The Case for Vertical Real Estate Shots

Some of my Real Estate clients insist on not doing any vertical shots. Their reasoning is that they do not display well on traditional real estate outlets such as the MLS and syndicated sites. 

This makes sense to some degree, however, I believe this is a short-sighted perspective. While those sites are fine to sell the home itself, they do very little to build your brand image in the community. In fact, and that is a gripe of many Realtors, those sites aim to minimize the exposure of the listing agent. Often referring to the listing agent as a credit way down in the fine print.

This is how Trulia displays listing agent's information. That is after a lot of scrolling through neighborhood and market stats.

The screen shot here is from Trulia.com, and as you can see, the credit is displayed below your competition who is paying to have their info displayed right above your name! Even though you're the one who has paid for the images that are bringing the traffic there in the first place!

In response to this, many Realtors are trying to control their own marketing efforts, by using social platforms such as Instagram. That's where detail shots and vertical shots come into play.

You see, Instagram is a platform that was built specifically for being used on mobile devices. In the beginning, the only way to post images was in the square format so that it didn't matter in which direction the device was held.

Now that Instagram also allows for both landscape images and portrait images, they are able to measure the effect of the orientation on the level of user engagement. As it turns out, vertical, or portrait, images have much higher user engagement than square posts, and a much much higher engagement that horizontal, or landscape, images. This is because, a vertical image displays a lot bigger on Instagram than their horizontal counterparts, thus grabbing the attention of the viewer much more effectively.

As you can see, not only is the vertical image much more engaging and giving a much higher level of detail without forcing the user to tilt their device, but the scrolling down takes longer, meaning the audience is seeing the post for a longer period of time, and in the world of social media, even fractions of a second make a difference.