Consumers are mostly visually driven, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a target market in need of high quality imagery as much as those in the property industry. Those looking to buy or rent properties will often make their decision to view based on the pictures provided, meaning low quality imagery will generally mean low interest.

With more and more agencies beginning to see the value in social media (if you’re one of the few that hasn’t click here), and how it makes more meaningful and more personal connections to your clients develop easier. But there’s one platform that stands out from the rest when it comes to sharing visuals and most other platforms can’t keep up.

Instagram, as of latest reports, has about 400 million users which is impressive enough on its own, but when you take into account that that’s roughly 80 million more than twitter, it becomes a statistic to really take seriously. If you’re taking a platform with 80 million less active users seriously, why are you leaving a larger pool untapped?

In addition to its large user base, Instagram isn’t just another social media platform; it’s become a fantastic platform for creating content. After Instagram was purchased by Facebook, it became one of the best ways to integrate your social media content in terms of marketing, allowing you to share the pictures you create with Instagram across your various other social media channels and website. Creating this sort of high quality content will go a long way with strengthening your brand and will help immensely with your marketing.

One word of warning however, don’t make that common agency mistake of only sharing your property pictures! Nothing will scare your potential followers away faster! Instead think about sharing pictures of you and your team, your local area, community events that you’re a part of. These sorts of personal pictures will do more in allowing people to make personal connections with your business and will give them more reasons to follow you.

While you’re at it with the local area, don’t forget to get involved with local Hashtags making your posts more discoverable (If you’re a #Hashtag novice find out more here). One really great thing you can do is even geo-tag your pictures! What that means is people looking at photos posted in the local area will see your updates, providing you with just one more way to get your updates out to the public.

Once you’ve mastered the picture side of things and how to get it out into public domain, it’ll be time to take a run at video. Instagram allows you to take micro-videos, letting you get quick ideas or snappy updates across in an easily consumable way. These 15 second videos can even be used to highlight spectacular features of your properties without giving too much away, generating more interest. The possibilities are limitless!

Just in case your still not sold and you think all this social stuff is a waste of time, be sure to check out Instagram’s own business blog here. They’ve got a heap of success stories and best practice blogs that’ll have you getting to grips with it in no time. Where better to learn about the platform for you business than from the creators themselves?

So, the only question left is: why be left behind when you can use this technology to show your business to a massive audience? If you really think about it, Instagram is the easiest way to create great content which will benefit your business! So get out there and start snapping!