Yesterday I receive a message from one of our members, Sara Bonert.  Sara is the Director of Broker Relations for Zillow She asked me if there was a way to incorporate the wonderful new about me video that was created for her profile on Zillow onto her ActiveRain profile.  She said that she had tried for a while, but was unable to get it embedded properly.

This got me thinking.  Whenever I visit someones profile, if they have a video that tells me about them, most of the time I will click & watch the video instead of reading paragraph after paragraph of text.  However If their video is boring & not engaging, I normally stop it after 15-20 seconds & move on to another place.  Zillow does an awesome job of implementing this into the profiles of their staff.

I decided shortly after inserting Sara's video onto her profile that this was something very unique that I could do to help my profile start to stand out from anyone else.  Granted, everyone can add a video to their profile after following the tutorial below, but even if all 153,000+ members do this, there still will only be one About Me video from Jeremy Blanton. So, one of the first things I did today was make my own welcome video.  You can see my example on my profile.

Tips to Creating an Effective About Me Video

Start by making an interesting video about you.  It took me several tries to make a video that sounded interesting & not boring.  The first few times I stuttered through my words & also looked very sad.  Also the tone of my voice was rather dull & drab.  Since videos are all about visualization you want to look happy & sound excited!

Don't get caught up on Professionalism.  While Sara had a professional on hand to create & edit her video, not everyone has access to that. My video was recorded straight from the web cam built into my computer.  I simply cut the section that I wanted to publish with a basic video editing software that every computer has.  (iMovie on Mac, or Windows Movie Maker on PC)

Be Human!  Whatever you do, please do not make your video a mini infomercial. It is fine to say your name & what company you work.  It is even ok to add in the easiest ways to contact you.  But please do not go through every designation, how many homes you have sold in the last month, why it is the perfect time to buy or sell real estate, or why they should hire you today.  Remember, all your contact information is already listed in your profile, so you don't need to say it on the video.  If they want to contact you, they can find how to do so right above. 

Also, share non business things that you enjoy doing, like golf, or reading a book, or going for a run.  Those small things can be the thing that connects that consumer with you.  Remember, your social media success is dependent on engaging someone else.

Keep it Simple. You video needs to be short sweet & to the point.  Don't add 25 slide transitions & pages of text intro & at the end.  If the video gets too long, you better have something really interesting to keep me around.  I would suggest keeping the video under 3 minutes max.  Mine was actually under 2 minutes because if you are anything like me, you got a lot going on & well to sit still & watch one page for a long period of time is difficult.

How to Insert Video On Your Profile

The first thing you need to do after creating your simple video is upload it to one of the many video platforms like youtube, viddler, vimeo, seesmic, and the list goes on.  Once you upload your video remember to go into the settings & change it to not include related videos if you are using youtube.  After you have done this, copy the embed code that is generated.

After copying the embed code, you will then visit your my home page & click on the Edit button next to My Profile.  You will see a button that says HTML third from the right on the toolbar.  I would suggest adding the video to the first section of your profile so that people see it first when entering your profile.  If you place it in the second or third box, the chances that they watch the video go down dramatically since they have to scroll down to see it.

When you click this button it brings up the entire box in HTML coding.  Then paste in the copied embed code in the box above all of the rest of the coding.  That way your video shows up at the top.  

Then click Update. 

****ONE VERY IMPORTANT LAST STEP!***

Make sure you click save profile to save addition of the HTML Embed Code.  If you do not click save profile after clicking update on the HTML box, the changes will not take effect.

Congratulations! You have now successfully added a video to your profile!

As always, while it seems like this may be some huge massive project to do, it really is not.  To shoot the video, edit, upload to youtube & embed on my profile the entire time with many interruptions was maybe 20 minutes.  Just like my video says, if you get stuck, do not hesitate to leave me a comment & ask for help!