StreetEasy is NYC's leading real estate marketplace. Home hunting in NYC is like nowhere else in the world. With sale and rental listings in more than 300 neighborhoods, across all 5 boroughs, and with specialized amenity searches just for New Yorkers (in-unit washer/dryer, in a pre-war building, near the 1-train, anyone?), we help city newbies and lifers alike find their place in and discover New York City.
In 2017, StreetEasy hired its first social media manager who established two goals:
1. Develop the brand's existing, but dormant, social accounts (focusing on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter) to expand StreetEasy's reach, audience, and traffic, and ultimately achieve our business goals (including increasing views of listing pages and connecting agents with prospective buyers and renters).
2. Produce social content that supports StreetEasy's mission to help New Yorkers both find their homes and fuel their discovery of New York City.
LAUNCH #STREETEASYFINDS: New York City is one of the most photographed cities in the world, but much still remains to be discovered. Our UGC tag #streeteasyfinds, launched in February 2017, highlights a local photographer each month to share their NYC-finds (city scenes, architecture, buildings, and homes) and invites New Yorkers to do the same. In July, StreetEasy collaborated with StreetDreams magazine, a quarterly publication that's dedicated to showcasing the talents of photographers worldwide, regardless of professional experience, to run a photo contest on Instagram. The winner became a featured #streeteasyfinds photographer and had his images shared on both the StreetEasy and StreetDreams accounts. Each month StreetEasy creates round-ups on our blog of our favorite UGC images.
CREATE SUPPORTIVE, ACTIONABLE, AND EDUCATIONAL CONTENT & EDITED LISTINGS: We don't want to share just images of photogenic homes; we want to use our social channels to educate our viewers and help them find their homes. StreetEasy is optimized to show users the homes they know they want to see (the more filters, the more specific your search results), but for the more open-minded or casual apartment hunter, who may be as happy in downtown Brooklyn as on the Upper East Side, the results can feel limitless. With user data as our guide, we surface the homes our audience most wants to see through content like our weekly Most Popular Sale of the Week, which includes a corresponding weekly Instagram Story tour to show the home up-close. StreetEasy also compiles a variety of rental, sale price, and open house round-ups to make sure our most desirable listings are the easiest to find, and don't get lost through a filtered search.
Other notable and educational social content in 2017 included Instagram Stories featuring our Senior Economist, and a Facebook Live with the pet-sitting service Rover sharing the most pet-friendly neighborhoods in NYC (which was watched by more than 10,000 viewers and featured dogs available for adoption).
NATIONWIDE PARTNERSHIPS: StreetEasy is for New Yorkers, but we also want to introduce ourselves to anyone interested in making NYC their home. We collaborated with national brands to create content that was specific to NYC living, but could be enjoyed by home lifestyle enthusiasts far and wide. Projects included touring the homes of Homepolish NYC designers to learn how they found and decorated their apartments (while encountering some very specific NYC challenges like no windows or closets, and non-existent kitchens) and How-To cleaning videos with Handy. We also worked with influencers like writer and actress Tavi Gevinson to hear about her move from Manhattan to Brooklyn and tour her new apartment, as well learned about actress Lexi Lawson's discovery of her midtown neighborhood, where she moved to be closer to the Richard Roper theater, as she performs in Hamilton on Broadway.
By the end of 2017, StreetEasy saw the following results from our social efforts:
1. Our #streeteasyfinds hashtag has been used by more than 500 unique accounts, nearly 6,000 times, with a potential reach of 3.9 million, and potential impressions of 40.9 million, and has generated 1.6 million engagements.
2. Our social engagement grew by 696.21%, with 183% account growth across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. This increased traffic to our site by 1,296%, and contributed more than 500,000 site sessions (second only to organic search).
3. Building upon what we learned from our organic social efforts, we've become more effective in our paid advertising and achieved our business goals more efficiently. By using images that performed well on social, our cost per listing page view decreased by 27% and the cost per submit (connecting agents with prospective buyers and renters) decreased by 34%.
