Hey Y’all: This post contains some affiliate links which means if you purchase a product or service through that link – you don’t pay a penny more – and Oak City CRE may earn a small commission which helps me share better real estate stories! Thank you for the support!
Introduction
If you are an A/E/C professional, you should be sharing stories about your work! We are privileged to work in an industry that impacts the lives of people every day, often in ways that they don’t see and fully understand.
Below I have highlighted 10 ways that you can start sharing your stories, today! The major types of storytelling are writing, photography, video, and audio.
At the bottom of the article I have included a list of further hardware and software to help get you started.
Writing
If you could only choose one medium to share the stories and projects of your firm, the written word is likely the most impactful. That said, I hope in this article you are inspired to add a second (or third) medium!
With writing you can be brief. Brevity has its advantages when it comes to producing content, but brevity also forces you to simplify your project story to its essence.
Writing also allows you to go long form. With long form writing you can share in great detail and you can also share over a long period of time, both have their advantages.
With writing, you can share your stories on:
- Social Media
- Shared Platforms
- Your own website or blog
- Print Media
- Writing on Social Media
The quickest way to share a written story about your project is on social media.
If you don’t already have a social media account for yourself or your firm, they are easy to set up.
In addition to being quick, Social Media has the advantage of engagement capabilities. Your contacts will be able to provide feedback on your stories and projects and also share your posts with their network.
The downsides to sharing your project stories on social media can be negative or junky engagement, distraction, and lack of ownership.
Social Media is at its best as an open platform for communication and sharing. I like to keep my accounts public, not private. I see huge upside in sharing with a wide range of people. That said, the public nature of Social Media can allow for trolling and other bullying behavior. In my experience, the positive engagement far outweighs the negative.
Distraction is another downside to Social Media. To share effectively on Social Media platforms, you have to be an active participant. I regularly catch myself mindlessly scrolling through my feed after sharing a post, which is often a not very productive behavior. The more I share on social media, the more I tend to check my accounts as well. Distraction isn’t a huge problem, but definitely something that I need to keep in check. You might have to as well.
Lack of ownership is the third downside to Social Media. You need to remember that you are sharing your content on their platform. They own it. If the platform shuts down tomorrow, you have no control of what happens to your project stories, content, and network.
For sharing written Social Media content, my preferred platforms are Twitter and LinkedIn.
- Writing on a Shared Platform
Like Social Media, with a shared blogging platform like Medium you have advantages and disadvantages when it comes to telling your project stories.
The main advantages are ease of use, speed, and engagement. Setting up your Medium account and sharing your first post is very easy. If you have a Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, or Email account then signing up for Medium takes about a minute. The user interface for writing a post and publishing is also extremely simple and easy to use.
One thing to note about Medium is traffic source. While some readers will find your posts organically through the platform, I wouldn’t count on getting much traffic that way. If you want your story to be seen, you are going to have to get it to the people you want to see it.
In my experience the negative engagement you find on some Social Media accounts is less frequent on Medium.
Since Medium is a third party platform, you also don’t own your stories, Medium does. Just like the Social Media platforms.
- Writing on your own Platform
If you want complete control over the format and content of your written stories, then starting your own website or blog is the way to go!
For less than $200 you can set up your own website. When I started OakCityCRE.com I purchased a domain on Google Domains (~$20) and wordpress hosting on Bluehost (~$110). With a domain and hosting I set up a wordpress site using a free Astra theme with Elementor as my website builder. I purposefully kept things simple and inexpensive. Using a few YouTube tutorials and no coding necessary, I was able to set up my blog in a few hours and publish my first post.
The main advantage to writing on a blog is that you have complete creative freedom to share your stories how you like. You also maintain ownership over your content.
The disadvantages are complexity and upkeep. A website requires some maintenance. Also because you have more freedom to share stories how you like, there is more complexity. With the higher level of complexity, there are more things to go wrong.
In my experience with a blog, the potential challenges far outway any negatives, and I have been shocked how easy it has been to learn the skills required to set up and produce my own blog. YouTube will be your best friend when it comes to getting “how-to” advice and troubleshooting problems.
- Sharing your stories in Print Media
Magazines and newspapers are the two most common forms of print media where you can share stories about real estate projects. The difference between print media and the previous types of platforms listed above is that newspapers and magazines are considered earned media.
Earned media means that someone else has to decide to share your story. There is always one or more gatekeepers in earned media.
Newspapers and magazines can be great ways to share your stories because of their large readership and targeted audience. Local magazines and newspapers will have local audiences who might be the most targeted audience for your stories. In addition to geographic constraints, some papers and magazines have specific topics like business or city life.
While by definition you have no way to be in control of earned media, it always helps to have relationships. Journalists are always looking for good stories, so if you can build a relationship and help them with good ideas for stories then your story might get shared.
Photography
As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Using photography is a great way to share project updates and stories. Photography is also a great medium for sharing project stories because these days almost everyone has a mobile phone camera in their pocket at all times. Also, you can build yourself a Pole-Cam for getting shots from a higher perspective!
With project photography, I have found the following to be the best ways to share your stories:
- Social Media
- Private Galleries
- Message Boards, Communities, and Groups
- Social Media
As with using social media to share written stories, the benefits with sharing project photos on social media are: speed, engagement, and simplicity. The downsides are also the same: distraction and lack of ownership.
While Instagram is the largest photo-first social media network, I have found sharing project photography on Twitter and LinkedIn leads to higher quality engagement. I like to share project updates in part to start a conversation and have found conversation starting difficult on Instagram. Your mileage may vary. You can also share photos on other social networks like Facebook and TikTok, though I don’t have much experience with either.
One additional downside to using Social Media to share photographs is the lack of organization. There aren’t many great ways to keep photos together and find them again once they have gone through the Social Media feed.
- Private Galleries
There are many cloud based photography organizations and display services that you can use for your project stories. I have been using SmugMug for over a decade and have always been happy with their service.
Using a cloud-based system for storing and sharing your project photos has many benefits. On the cloud your photos are backed up and secure, you can organize and move photos however you like, and on many services you can control who has access to which photos. The downside is that most services are subscription based, though the cost is typically nominal.
One of my favorite ways to use private galleries to share project photos is to create an unlisted gallery with photos of a project from a specific date and share that gallery directly with clients. The unlisted gallery is not visible when someone goes to my public smugmug page. I can set up a gallery that is only accessible to someone with a specific link – password protection is also an option – and I email that link to the people or groups I want to have it. This targeted approach is fantastic for specific people and groups updated on a project.
- Message Boards, Communities, and Groups
In addition to public sharing on Social Media and private sharing in galleries there is a third option of online groups.
There are online groups, communities, and message boards for all types of topics. I spend time on The DTRaleigh Community and on r/raleigh on reddit because of my local focus. There are also large Facebook groups on specific topics that can be great for sharing project stories as well as keeping up with other projects. These targeted groups are fantastic for participating in and starting conversations about projects
Video
Another fantastic visual medium for sharing real estate and project stories is video. Like photography, with video you are able to communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Video can be more challenging than photography and writing however because of the more complicated editing requirements. Producing video has more steps, but the basics of video production are easy to learn and you can use free software. See the last section for more recommendations on software.
Using the phone in your pocket is a great place to start when capturing video content. The quality of the video will increase dramatically with the use of a tripod and/or gimbal to reduce camera shake. A drone is also a fantastic option for capturing aerial video and photography. If you go the drone route, make sure to comply with all local and Federal regulations when flying.
For sharing my project stories with video I like to use:
- YouTube
- Social Media platforms
- YouTube
Once you have captured and edited the video to your liking, uploading the footage to YouTube gives you an incredibly simple medium for sharing your project story.
Since YouTube and Google are owned by the same company, if you have a Gmail account, you already have access to a YouTube account.
Once your video is on YouTube you will still have to point viewers toward the video through email or Social Media. YouTube is a powerful search engine so your videos will get some organic views, but I wouldn’t count on much traffic coming from the search engine. Plus, you probably know the people who most want to see your videos, why not share them directly?
YouTube also can act like a video library for your content. All of your videos will “live” on the platform and you can organize them into playlists based on certain topics or projects.
- Social Media
Video content is also well suited for sharing your project stories on social media. Instagram and TikTok are two social networks that are primarily for visual content, including video. That said, for reasons listed above, I have found better levels of engagement in sharing video content through Twitter and LinkedIn.
Social media platforms have the same downside for video as they do for photography. If you are taking the time to produce photography and video content to share your projects I would also take the additional step of uploading the content to a gallery so you can keep it organized and easy to retrieve over time. Because projects often take so long to build, it’s compelling to pull up video footage from the beginning of a project and compare it to footage toward the end of construction.
Audio
Real Estate development can be an inherently visual practice. That said, I truly believe in the power of sharing project stories through an audio platform.
At the end of the day, projects are all about people. People are a huge part of creating the projects and a huge part of experiencing the projects. Without people there is no real estate and no purpose for real estate.
Audio stories tend to have a smaller “reach” in terms of listeners, but the impact seems to be greater. I think the impact increases because a listener hears all of the context, detail, and texture that comes out of the voices of the person talking about the project. These details are hard to translate in written and visual formats.
For sharing my project stories with audio, the best format is:
- Podcasts
- Podcasts
Setting up a “podcasting studio” may seem like a complicated task, but by following a few best practices while recording, the setup can be simple and quite powerful.
For equipment you will need a recording device and at least one microphone. A professional quality podcast recorder that has four inputs will cost less than $200 and each microphone and cable is less than $100. All in, equipment to record a two-person interview is around $400 to start. It can get way more expensive, but I would aim to keep it simple.
In addition to creating the recording you will need to edit the recording and upload the podcast to an online hosting platform for distribution. I have had great experiences with using free editing software and the hosting fees start at around $12 per month.
The only other input is time. In my experience for a one hour interview episode, plan on investing about five hours. One hour for planning, two hours for the total recording session, and two hours to edit.
Software and Hardware Resources
Below is a list of software, web based services, and hardware that have worked well for me. There are a ton of options out there and this list is by no means complete, but it’s a good place to get you started.
Resources for Writing:
- Google Docs (Free)
- Microsoft Word ($)
- Bluehost for web hosting ($)
- Google Domains for domain purchase ($)
Resources for Images:
- Adobe Lightroom for photo editing and organization ($)
- Inkscape for graphic design (Free)
- Smugmug for online storage and galleries to share ($)
Resources for Video:
- Davinci Resolve for video editing and color correction (Free)
- DJI Osmo Mobile* gimbal for cell phone image stabilization ($)
- Parrot Anafi Drone* ($)
Resources for Audio:
- Audacity for editing (Free)
- Zoom Podtrak P4* for recording ($)
- Shure SM58* handheld microphone ($)
- Buzzsprout for podcast hosting and distribution ($)
Conclusion
I hope you take the chance to tell more stories about your projects. You can make the process as simple or as complicated as you like. I lean toward the simple route. The most important choice you can make is not how to share your stories, but that you will start sharing your stories today.
If you have any questions about real estate storytelling, please reach out at [email protected]!
*These links are Affiliate Links
