2016 Real Estate Social Media Trends

Real estate social media marketing has always been outlier when it comes to the focus of brokerages. Since social media's early days, where platforms were immature startups trying to gain a foothold in the public conciousness, we're now to the point where these are mature, proven platforms, with useful advertising options, and plenty of free opportunities to publicize your real estate brand.

Though the world of social media marketing turns quickly, with new players arriving in the space and existing social networks scrambling to add new functionality to their platforms to stay ahead of the game. Today I'm going to look at a few of the upcoming trends we're going to see in the social media space moving forward in 2016.

Social Media Heads Private

While social networks are known for the noted publicness of things that get shared, there is definitely a move towards privatizing social conversation. Both Facebook and LinkedIn have seen a huge uptick in the number of private groups created on their platforms. These self organized communities can often be where the best conversations are being had online.

Snapchat was one of the frontrunners in this movement, taking social conversation private again, but there's been a shift to messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, iMessage and Kik, taking the torch from networks like BBM, MSN and AOL chat products. A generation of users are more comfortable using a chat app than they ever will be with phone/email. This is a big shift for the real estate industry that lives and breathes phone calls, email and face to face interactions. If you're only offering phone and email as the only ways to connect with your real estate leads, you could very well be missing out.