Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
As one of the fastest-growing social media platforms today, Snapchat constantly shows how it can differentiate itself from its competitors. This is even more obvious after Snap’s recent announcement: its newly expanded audio features, including Sounds Recommendations for Lenses and Sound Sync for Camera Roll. Snapchat users are looking forward to these new tools to create even more interesting and engaging content for followers.
Even more exciting, though, is how these new capabilities offer great opportunities from a marketing standpoint. Online marketing is synonymous with social media marketing and Sounds Recommendations for Lenses and Sound Sync for Camera Roll are poised to offer ways to build your brand in innovative and exciting ways. Here’s what you should know about how these new tools can help you to upgrade your real estate marketing even higher.
First, let’s look closer at what Snapchat’s new tools do. The platform’s already seeing great results with its Lens augmented reality (AR) technology, which offers unparalleled expressive experiences to engage with audiences. When Snapchat added Sounds capabilities to Lens, things got even better by creating multimedia experiences that had the potential for an even deeper impact on engagement metrics, with Snap reporting 2.7 billion videos created and over 183 billion views since Sounds on Snapchat went live.
Now, Snapchat has taken another step by adding both Sounds Recommendations for Lenses as well as Sound Sync for Camera roll photos and videos. When you’re looking for the perfect Sound to combine with a Lens, you can now tap the Sounds icon and be presented with a list of Sounds that are likely to be relevant to whatever Snap you’re making. Sound Sync, meanwhile, makes it easy to automatically create montage videos that sync to the beat of the audio track selected from the Sounds library, with montages of between 4 and 20 photos or videos.
Real estate professionals looking to grow their brand know that this requires online marketing. With a huge component of that being social media, using tools to maximize your engagement on social platforms is essential. XR technologies, like VR and AR, are growing by leaps and bounds, representing massive growth opportunities for marketers. In fact, Snapchat itself says that 70 percent of its users are engaging in its AR tools like Lens on a daily basis. Using AR tools for shopping, for example, allow potential customers to envision what a product like a piece of furniture might look like in their own home.
Thus, ways to enhance AR experiences for users on Snapchat therefore strengthen the potential for these technologies to increase marketing engagement. Recommendations for Lenses accomplishes this handily by offering a selection of complementary audio components. Likewise, Sound Sync for Camera offers tools for both related and non-Lens-related social content when creating more attractive image and video montages. The end result of both tools will look and sound more professional, are likely to be more compelling to watch, and, by extension, provide better, universal opportunities to build engagement on the platform that simply wasn’t there before.
XR tools for real estate have been around for some time. 3D imaging and visualization are now common features for MLS listings, thanks to companies like Matterport that can digitize and create virtual floor plans that prospective buyers can explore in the comfort of their own home, and AR tools are excellent for staging properties to help show them off to their best potential. Combining these tools in new and interesting ways with social media content is a match made in heaven to be sure.
This is why the new capabilities Snapchat is offering with Sound Sync for Camera and Sounds Recommendations for Lenses are welcome additions to the real estate marketer’s arsenal. The value of the heightened impact of well-chosen audio tracks to accompany video content simply can’t be undersold. Video tends to have better engagement than static images, and video with sound further reinforces this dynamic. Whatever types of content you’re designing for Snapchat, the platform’s new Sounds tools will be beneficial.
Snapchat isn’t the largest or most influential social media platform out there. It’s not Facebook, YouTube, or Instagram, for example; these major players might not have the social media market cornered, but they are major players that currently dominate in terms of the highest overall reach. Yet just because they’re the biggest platforms doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the best choice for your social marketing efforts - these platforms tend to be so large and diverse that targeting more focused demographics often becomes a major challenge.
Snapchat, due to its slightly smaller scope, is still a highly successful and popular social media platform. Its user demographics include more than 360 million active users (around 100 million of which are in the US alone), primarily those that use the app while commuting or otherwise on the go. Additionally, with users that skew slightly younger than platforms like Facebook, Snapchat can help you expose your content to target demos like first-time home buyers. And now, with the new features that Snap has released, it’s got even more potential for growth. This makes it a fantastic vehicle for real estate marketers of all stripes.
