StreetEasy’s mission is to improve every experience of buying, selling, and renting real estate in NYC. Our social channels are a critical part of bringing this mission to New York City residents and aspiring residents alike. Our channels share content that helps educate and energize New Yorkers no matter whether they’re a buyer, seller, renter, or browser.
Our objective is to use our social media channels to shift perception from StreetEasy as simply a search and find tool that’s no longer useful once your search is over, to a valued resource and partner to help you unlock your next opportunity and find your place in New York City.
By building a social strategy around StreetEasy’s extensive market data research, collaborating with the city’s best real estate agents, and connecting with new users on emerging platforms, we were able to reposition StreetEasy as more than search and find.
In 2020, our strategy expanded from focusing on content that was simply engaging or sharable, to content that invited meaningful and educational conversations with our audience.
In support of this strategy, we launched the following programs on our social channels:
TALK DATA TO ME - EMPOWERING USERS WITH FACTS:
We knew the amplification of StreetEasy’s renowned housing data and knowledge of housing protections could help New Yorkers better navigate the pandemic. The expertise of our economist was called upon from outlets ranging from The New York Times to Bloomberg. StreetEasy even joined forces with the Mayor’s office as a part of the NYC Recovery Data partnership. But we knew we could reach an even wider, more diverse group of people through social.
In March 2020 we went where no other major real estate brand had gone before: TikTok. Quickly followed by hundreds of thousands of users, StreetEasy engaged with audiences from different generations and different parts of the country.
Regular updates simplified complex findings and offered New Yorkers a real-time look at the state of the NYC real estate market. Through our TikTok account, we broke down the impact of Covid on the rental market, legal housing protections for New Yorkers, how to negotiate rent during the pandemic, and what an HDFC apartment is (and how to find one), all in an engaging format that reached hundreds of thousands of users.
ACTIONABLE ADVICE FROM REAL ESTATE PROS
We centered content around users' questions and on the people qualified to answer them. A monthly Instagram Stories series, “My Agent Says,” connects a licensed NYC real estate agent with a noteworthy New Yorker. Ahead of their conversation, the influencer crowdsources questions from their audience. The agent then provides easy-to-digest answers during their conversation. Through this series, we’ve tackled questions ranging from “Can I sign a lease if I haven’t seen it in-person?” to “What red flags should I look for on a virtual tour?” and “Should I take advantage of the market now and buy a home?” Despite the stay-at-home order, we shifted these conversations from in-person to digital so that we could add real value to our users by offering real-time advice to help them navigate the changing market amid the pandemic.
REAL-TIME PRODUCT UPDATES SHAPED BY USERS:
Even in a pandemic, people need to move and we needed to ensure that StreetEasy was responding to New Yorkers’ needs and letting our users know how we adapted to help them.
Social took on newfound importance to our product developers: It aggregated user needs and, for the first time, became a place to educate our audiences about getting more out of their search on StreetEasy.
Special product enhancements included new amenity filters shaped by pandemic-driven apartment preferences (private and public outdoor space) and the implementation of new price transparency tools to do away with our users’ confusion around net-effective rent. Announcements that previously would have been left for users to discover on their own now became a staple of our social content.
In 2020, our social channels, driven by organic efforts, reached 33M people, grew by 319% YoY, and received more than 3M engagements, well beyond an NYC-only audience.
We more than met our goal of creating content that didn’t just seek to engage and entertain, but also to foster meaningful conversations and provide educational resources to our audience. We solidified StreetEay’s role as more than just a search and find tool, and instead, as a home search partner.
