The meteoric spike in the popularity of TikTok content, YouTube Shorts, and Instagram Reels clearly demonstrates our collective insatiable appetite for short-form videos. As a real estate professional, you can make no better investment of your time and advertising budget this summer than honing your short-form content skills!

In fact, not only are short-form videos the single most popular format for all types of social media, they have also been recognized by multiple publications as being the most effective form of social media advertising.

A whopping 75% of consumers want to watch short-form videos to find out more about products and services. Thanks to low production costs and reduced time investment, the ROI on short-form videos wins hands-down against other marketing strategies.

Your conversion rates on your short-form content will likely impress you, and if you create the right content at the right time, it could well go viral, earning you a steady stream of both qualified buyers and motivated sellers.

Here’s what to know about short-form videos in 2023.

Q: What qualifies as short-term content?

A: Anything 60 seconds or less counts as short-term content, though there are some viewers who will stick around for up to three minutes for particularly useful, interesting, or entertaining content.  

Thanks to their scrollable length, these bite-sized videos are easy to watch back-to-back. You may wish to create a series of videos that can be enjoyed both individually and as a set; this dual purpose can help you reach two categories of viewers with the same amount of effort it would normally take to reach just one.

Q: Where should I post?

A: TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook are all popular platforms for short-form content. TikTok takes the lead by a large margin, but you may find that the audience you want to reach prefers one or more of the other platforms instead.

We recommend posting across all platforms for six months to a year, then using your analytics data to identify where your videos are most popular. At that point, do your utmost to refine your content to succeed on your chosen platform.

Q: How can I create consumable content?

A: This will depend on the ever-changing trends that algorithms “notice” are holding viewers’ attention glued to their screens longer than other categories of content.

Take a look at what’s trending in the world of real estate short-form content, then consider how you might translate your own ideas to these trends. You can also review which of your own long-form content has captured your audience the most successfully, then adapt your strategies to the bite-sized market.  

Q: Are there formatting tips to help me get started?

A: Absolutely. Your 60-second shorts, reels, or TikToks should be recorded vertically. Choose a popular, trending song or sound to use as background. For any spoken dialog, create easy-to-read captions for Deaf and hard-of-hearing users as well as the huge portion of your audience who will be watching your videos on mute.

Q: What kind of things should I make videos about?

A: In addition to following trends and adapting your long-form video topics, the following ideas have historically performed well for your fellow real estate professionals:

• Virtual property tours can transport a thousand interested buyers to your chosen property. When compared to an open house event, your time and effort invested in a virtual tour is negligible, and the results may be off the charts.

• Highlight the neighborhoods that you’ve chosen as your niche. Show off what makes the area special, including amenities like beautiful parks, libraries, markets, and schools. This kind of content is especially helpful for anyone who is moving to Middle Tennessee from elsewhere in the country.

• Showcase what is developing and happening in your niche area. New community amenities and housing developments are always interesting to potential buyers.

• Offer tips for newcomers to the area, first-time homebuyers, families with young children, seniors who want to find a home in which they can age in place, or your niche audience, whomever they may be.

• Create staging advice videos for homeowners looking to sell. Before and after comparisons of decluttering efforts and deep cleaning results appeal to anyone looking for informative content that also offers a hit of instant gratification—and that’s going to be most adults on the platform you’ve chosen!

• Answer a question you’ve received recently or frequently. Try not to answer more than a few questions per short. If you have a long list of questions to answer, an ongoing series could be ideal for your channel.

• If you decide to create longer videos, be sure to create a short-form clip to capture your audience and direct them to your long-form edition.

• If you have clients who are willing to be filmed, their testimonials could be used to create excellent advertising shorts.

The Takeaway

Regardless of what your other advertising endeavors may be this year, it will certainly be worth your time to create short-form video content. Remember, you can create a dozen of these shorts in one afternoon, then post them as a trickle over the following couple of weeks. This method is especially helpful when you want to create a series and you have a cohesive idea in mind already - knock the task of filming out all at once.

The team here at Parks looks forward to seeing your short-form content all over the internet this summer and into the future!