A lettings guru is calling on agents to embrace social media trends in order to reach new audiences.

Agent Rainmaker uses Reels – which are video posts on Instagram – and the firm has a Tiktok account to create brand awareness.

“We reach between two and three times the number of people when we post video content on social media, compared to pictures” says AR chief and former ARLA president Sally Lawson.

“I started my lettings career back in the early 90s, years before the very early social media sites had even been thought about, so I understand it can be daunting to learn about algorithms and ads, reach and reels. But social media is now used by the majority of businesses so you’ve got to learn how to stand out from the crowd” she claims.

“The content you share is undoubtedly important, but so too is the way you present that content to your audience. And it really doesn’t need to be that difficult: perhaps you’re thinking of sharing a picture from your next team day, if you simply record some video snippets instead and add audio to them, then you could reach many hundreds more people.

“You can influence who sees your posts in a variety of ways (so that you’re reaching potential clients), but the best way to influence how many people see your posts is to ensure you’re creating the type of content that we know are favoured by the algorithms in place on each of the platforms. The teams who create these algorithms tell us openly how they work, which means there’s no excuse not to post content which is going to tick the boxes in terms of highest reach.

Agent Rainmaker says a study of 81m posts on Instagram shows that engagement on traditional posts featuring just one picture dropped 44 per cent in three years following the introduction of Reels.

Tiktok – where users can only share videos, not pictures or text-only posts – reportedly has an engagement rate 15 per cent higher than most other sites, and it saw a 100 per cent growth rate between 2020 and 2022, boasting 1.6billion users now.

Even the longer-established networking sites have shifted towards prioritising videos, with Facebook having started telling users back in 2019 that its algorithm would favour ‘original and high-quality videos’. 

LinkedIn users are five times more likely to comment on a video than a photo or text-based posts – and even paid-for posts are more effective when they’re video-based, in fact users spend three times as long watching them compared to the time they spend viewing static adverts on the site.