The words we use to plan, film and measure Instagram Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, defined in plain English. Written by a Toronto agency that ships these videos every week, not by a dictionary.
A-roll is the main footage, usually someone speaking to camera. B-roll is the supporting footage cut over it: the property, the product, the street. Good B-roll keeps the picture changing while the story continues.
Real estate video built around the agent as a person rather than around a listing. Properties change every few weeks; the agent is the constant, and the audience follows people far more readily than listings.
What an ordinary video of yours actually does. We use the median of your recent videos. Every result is judged against your own baseline, not against another account's.
Filming many videos in one session. A single shoot day with a director, camera and sound typically produces 12 to 16 finished vertical videos, which is a month of content for most clients.
Subtitles rendered into the video itself rather than added by the platform. A large share of short-form is watched muted, so burned-in captions carry the story when sound is off.
Starting a video in the middle of the action, with no intro, logo or greeting. It is the most reliable way to protect the hook.
The share of viewers who watch to the end. Short videos with a strong payoff at the end tend to have high completion, which platforms read as a sign the video deserves a bigger audience.
A recurring video format following a building as it rises. For pre-construction projects it solves the biggest content problem, which is having nothing finished to show.
One of a small number of recurring themes an account posts about. Pillars keep a feed coherent, but they should be chosen from what the audience responds to, not decided once and left alone.
On YouTube Shorts, the stricter view count kept in YouTube Analytics after YouTube began counting every play and replay as a view in 2025. It is the more honest measure of attention.
The first one to three seconds of a video, whose only job is to stop the scroll and promise a reason to keep watching. Most videos that fail, fail here, before anything later in the edit is seen.
The number of times your content was displayed, including repeat displays to the same person. Impressions are always equal to or higher than reach.
A video about a specific property for sale. The straight walkthrough version reaches mostly people already shopping in that price range; built around the agent and a point of view, the same listing reaches a far larger audience.
The middle value of an account's recent view counts: half its videos did more, half did less. It is a far better baseline than the average, because one viral video drags the average up to a number no normal post ever reaches.
Why it matters: one video was 46% of everything.
The share of the people who saw your content who do not follow you. It is the number that tells you whether you reached new people or just talked to your existing audience. In one client month it was 97%.
Reach that comes from the platform choosing to show your content, with no money spent to promote it. Every result in our portfolio is organic.
A video's views divided by the median views of the account that posted it. It is the metric we use to judge whether an idea worked, because raw views mostly measure how big the account already is. A video at 10x its creator's median is a real signal whether that means 20,000 views or 2 million.
Used in real estate Reel ideas, ranked by data and The Breakdown.
Spending money to push a post to more people, for example by boosting it. It can extend a video that already works; it cannot rescue a weak premise, and it tends to flatten the natural spread of results.
A deliberate change in picture, sound or pacing that resets a viewer's attention, used at the start of a video and again where retention tends to dip.
A video framed as "point of view", putting the viewer inside a situation, such as a client walking into a dealership. It is one of the most repeatable formats in our automotive and real estate work.
The pattern where a small number of videos produce most of the results. Across ten of our published client videos, the single best one accounted for 46% of all views and the top three for 73%. It is why short-form should be planned as a portfolio, not forecast per video.
The number of unique accounts that saw your content. One client account we run reached 45,087,188 accounts in a single month.
How much of a video people watch, usually shown as average percentage viewed or a retention curve. It is the signal most tightly tied to how far a short-form video is distributed. One of our client Shorts held 84.4% average retention on its way to 1.2 million views.
When a viewer watches a video more than once, often because the end flows back into the start. A rewatch is a strong signal, which is one reason tight edits outperform loose ones.
The part of a vertical frame not covered by the platform's buttons, captions and profile name. Text and faces placed outside it get hidden behind the interface.
When a viewer bookmarks a video to come back to it. Saves signal lasting value and tend to be highest on useful, reference-style content.
The small first group a platform shows a new video to. Your followers are part of it, which is the one stage where follower count clearly matters. How that group behaves decides whether the video is shown more widely.
When a viewer shares your video, usually by direct message. Instagram has repeatedly named sends as one of the strongest signals for showing a Reel to people who do not follow you, because a send means someone spent their own reputation on your video.
A repeatable format with a consistent premise or character that viewers learn to recognise. A good series compounds, because the second episode starts with an audience that already knows what to expect.
Vertical video built for phone feeds: Instagram Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Most short-form that performs is under a minute, although Instagram and YouTube both now allow up to three minutes.
A video of one person speaking to camera. It is cheap to make and can work well, but only when the person has a genuinely interesting point; generic market-update talking heads are among the weakest real estate formats we track.
An Instagram feature that shows a Reel to non-followers first, before your followers see it. It is useful for testing a new format without it landing in front of your existing audience.
Content made by customers or creators rather than by the brand. In paid social the term also covers creator-style ads made to look native to the feed.
Video shot or framed for a phone held upright, 9 units wide by 16 tall, usually 1080 by 1920 pixels. It fills the screen in every short-form feed.
How many times a video was played. Platforms define it differently and have changed their definitions over time; Instagram and YouTube now count a view when playback starts, including replays. Compare views within one platform, never across them.
The total time people spend watching a video. On short-form it matters mainly through retention, since a short video cannot rack up much watch time any other way.
We plan, film, edit and post the whole thing. Or start small: send us your handle and we will measure your Reels against your own median.
