Not long ago, there was a widespread belief in real estate that millennials were destined to be a renter generation. By now, that’s had to give way to a most unexpected reality: According to the National Association of Realtors, millennials compose 36 percent of today’s home buyers, generationally the largest share of the market. They are essentially driving the real estate market, buying in cities large and small. Wherever you’re working, it’s become clear that If you want to sell homes, being visible to this generation is crucial to success.
There’s no way around it: Marketing to a generation that may interact more on social media than it does in real life means marketing online, and Instagram is quite clearly an important force in their social media landscape. It’s the second most popular social media platform in America and steadily on the rise, and over 60 percent of Instagram users come from the 18-39 demographic. To capture those crucial eyeballs for your real estate business, there are a few basic guidelines to keep in mind.
1. Engaging Content Means Genuine Passion
Millennials grew up with social media and in the information-saturated world of the Internet. They’re savvy media consumers who are generally good at spotting emotionally arid exercises in brand management, and who tend to seek out people — on Instagram and elsewhere — who share their passions for a particular topic. There are good reasons for this: Having genuine passion for a topic is the first and often most important step toward being the kind of expert who’s capable of original insight on the subject matter.
The first step to acquiring your audience is to decide what basic qualities they should associate with you. They’ll be visiting your page to get an idea about not just the properties you’re working on but whether you’re the kind of person they want to work with. Whether the virtues that make you stand out are that you’re fun and spontaneous, driven and focused, or insatiably curious and eager to share that curiosity with the world, it’s this honest take on what brings you to real estate that will form the core of your Instagram messaging.
2. Use Video Marketing
Photos are the core of Instagram’s user engagement model, and you should definitely be using the service to share interesting photos of the properties you’re working with or images related to your personal brand and establishing the traits that will make clients want to work with you. That said, video marketing should be on your radar as much as possible: It has fantastic ROI, increases your reach and boosts shares for and trust in your content. You don’t have to break the proverbial bank to produce quality video content, and there are plenty of guideline documents available to help you make the most of this medium.
3. Tell a Story
There are two senses in which this advice matters on Instagram. At the level of the content itself, your posts should be telling the story about you that’s relevant to the kind of brand identity you want to promote. In a more specific sense, though, this is about the Instagram Stories feature, a powerful tool that gets your content to stand out beyond your audience’s normal scrolling feed and that has generated immense marketing success for many brands and businesses on the platform. Instagram Stories is one of those features that’s simple to use on its face but can be extensively customized for maximum impact.
