You’re thinking about having a real estate video done for your next listing and you have lots of questions. This is a weekly feature to help answer your real estate video questions. Our website is RealEstateDigitalMedia.com
Before you start lowering the price on your listing (and lowering your commission, too) maybe a social media marketing review is in order first.
A local agent (I’ll this person Agent X) who is a member of a LinkedIn group to which I belong, recently posted about the price reduction of their $1million+ listing with a link to their website. I spent some on Agent X’s site and here’s what I found:
• An out of date website with out of date social media;
•Visually it looked okay but, instead of using video for the listing there was a slide show with the usual photo arrangement that had no continuity(and no music either);
•There was a Facebook icon but, Agent X has not posted anything all year;
•Twitter icon where Agent X posts a few times a week; and
•A truly terrible introductory video (X is standing there, clearly reading a script) of Agent X on their YouTube page that is a few years old telling us how great X is. X looks like they are in the mail room of their office. It was poorly lit. There was a slight echo. It was really bad. Note, that video (from a few years ago) was the only video on X’s YouTube Channel.
What could Agent X be doing differently?
1) Dump the slide show. It’s 2014, 90% of all web traffic will be video. Agent X has to stop using tired old slide shows and make the jump to quality, full-motion video, especially with $1million+ listings;
2) Add video testimonials from happy clients to X’s home page;
3) Agent X’s Facebook page is a personal profile. X needs to have a Business page for X’s 
business and a personal profile for X’s personal life. I don’t want to see photos of X’s vacation.
4) X hasn’t posted on Facebook in over a year. X needs to start posting on Facebook on a regular basis. Facebook is a great place to post the videos of X’s listings and the videos of X’s clients’ testimonials. But X also needs to post about persons, places, and things that are interesting, fun and informative and using some type of visual with each post. In social media terms, X needs to ‘engage’ their readers.
5) Start an e-newsletter and send it to X’s database (assuming X, who says they have been an agent for many years, has a database). If X doesn’t have a database then that is another thing X should be doing.
6) Get a new, and better, introductory video shot of X, uploaded to YouTube and embed it on X’s website.
7) Start having some community videos shot to showcase the areas X sells also uploaded to YouTube and embedded on X’s website.
8) Start blogging.
And then X needs to do all of this consistently. Social media works but it takes time. Think of it as planting a garden. You start with seeds. You need to nurture and care for them in order for the plant to grow and just as it is unreasonable to expect to plant the seeds on Monday and have a full grown plant on Friday, it is the same with social media.
We shoot real estate video tours in Los Angeles and we use social media to help Realtors® promote their listings so we stay on top of technology and social media. Our background is in filmmaking. To us a real estate video is 30 frames per second not a series of still photos put together in a slide-show. Our website is RealEstateDigitalMedia.com
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