Residential

Can you sell your home on TikTok?

While technology continues to revolutionise the property industry by changing the way people find their homes, property professionals also need to follow social media trends to capitalise on the global shot in the arm that PropTech has given them.

More and more industry professionals are turning to short-form video content with the current trend leader in the social media space, according to GWI’s flagship report on the latest trends in social media, as a marketing tool to meet potential customers.

Good, better, video

GWI’s report shows that short videos are quick to create and tend toward the less polished, more spontaneous content people are after. Consumers on channels like TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Facebook Stories are far more likely to use social media for creative inspiration. Short clips are a huge hit with Gen Z with one in four consumers watching a video made by a brand every month. They are also shared extensively on messaging platforms like WhatsApp, opening access to consumers who may not be on TikTok. Harnessing this trend to showcase their expertise and their properties to would-be buyers is the next step for an industry rapidly coming to terms with the need to adopt off-site ads and social media marketing.

Massaging the algorithm

For businesses – and property practitioners in particular – the change in the way the algorithms on these platforms function plays into the hands of those who can create compelling content,” says Flow Co-CEO and Co-Founder Gil Sperling. “The algorithms – once focussed on aggregating content from connections, friends and family – now draw far more on content that users regularly interact with to populate their feeds”.

Sperling says that these short-form videos are incredibly addictive because it’s easy to consume scores of videos that the algorithm knows you’ll be interested in, in a short period of time.

The most successful short-form videos are also authentic – meaning they don’t need to be polished and produced by experts: a boon to property practitioners who can showcase their portfolio of properties more easily.”

An implicit understanding of the way social media platforms works and the ability to produce the technology that makes it simpler for property practitioners to access them without having an in-depth knowledge of how complex dashboards and algorithms work helps us to enable the industry with tech. That leaves property practitioners to focus on doing deals and becoming trusted partners to buyers and sellers, with our tech taking care of the marketing work,” comments Flow Co-Founder and Co-CEO Daniel Levy.

As more people start to trust social media platforms as sales channels – 35% of Instagram users will make a purchase on the platform in 2023, just behind Facebook and TikTok, both of which will see a purchase percentage of 37%, according to a Hootsuite study. That makes it essential for authentic businesses to form trusting relationships with consumers – particularly when it comes to an investment as big as a home purchase.

There’s no reason that the property industry shouldn’t be able to harness social media platforms to help the right homes find the right people.