With days full of Virtual Tours, Panoramic Photos, Tech-Savvy Sellers and Buyers, and a Plethora of Photo and Video Options, what's an Agent to do?
The marketing options available in today's market are daunting and could have an older agent (LIKE ME) who's not the most tech-smart be drooling dumbfounded over trying to understand what's what. Wide Angle lens? 1080 dpi? 12x optical zoom? Panorama's? Interactive Floorplans? Pixels? Photoshop? Retouching? WHAT?!?!?!?
Some agents, when faced with doing expansive marketing on luxury homes, simply hire an outside companies like CDI, CirclePix, VirtualTours.com, etc., to handle all the photos, tours, music, HTML, blah blah blah blah blah. While the products for these companies are solid, well designed, effective, and reliable, there is a way to gain MORE EXPOSURE with your online marketing than simply paying someone else to do it.
In October of 2006 Google Inc., forked out 1.65 BILLION dollars and bought all of YouTube, the popular video sharing site hosting a wide variety of videos. Since Google paid a pretty penny (many pretty pennies actually) for the rights to own YouTube, you bet that Google will favor YouTube results over other video-type media...just take a look!
A simple "home for sale clintonville ohio" video search resulted in pages of YouTube videos before any other video-hosting sites. GOOGLE LOVES YOUTUBE! You can bet that videos tagged properly will appear high on the results list when buyers are searching for homes in your area! YouTube accounts are FREE to sign up, and making videos is not as daunting as you might think!
This is one of the videos that The Jackson Team has online currently marking a home in the Old North Columbus area. I know what you're thinking..."...this is a slideshow, where's the actual video?" Good question. Practically speaking, actual video tours are difficult to shoot, edit, store, share, etc. You need the right kind of camera, an extremely steady hand, a good microphone, and lots of time to really get the thing to look somewhat professional. In reality most virtual tour companies don't ACTUALLY shoot video! Many are just like the one above. A slideshow with descriptions and music. That's it! If your camera is able to to panoramic shots, or have photo editing software, you can easily stitch together a photo and set it to pan left to right, giving the illusion of a virtual tour, without involving any video or audio equipment!
Here in The Jackson Team office, we use iMovie, a standard application on Apple products, to make our videos. Each of them take about 30-45 minutes to put together, and within an hour we're live on YouTube with a URL link ready to share with buyers, friends, colleagues, etc! We use these YouTube videos as a way to coax new sellers to list with us, because these videos will give their home much more exposure than normal! We can easily edit these videos and re-upload them, no need to make calls to outside companies to fix typo's or make changes!
For those without a Mac product, Microsoft PowerPoint is also capable of producing video's like these. Experiment with the many options available and see how it turns out! Below are all the video's currently on our YouTube Channel . Click through and see what's possible on YouTube!
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