Why Real Estate is Missing from YouTube

marketing, YouTube Tagged with:
Feb 212010

The White House Channel on YouTube

A recent article on Social Media Examiner explored the marketing impact of YouTube.  Particularly compelling in that article were these YouTube usage stats:

  • In 2009, approximately 100 million Americans watched 6 billion videos on YouTube each month
  • Six out of seven U.S Internet users watch online videos every month
  • YouTube accounted for 70% of all U.S. visits to some 60 online video sites (Google was #2 with a 4.6% share)
  • In December 2009, U.S. Internet users watched an average of 187 videos per person
  • Sixty-two percent of YouTube viewers are over 35; about half have college degrees and incomes of $75,000 or more
  • In December, 2009, there were 9.7 billion search queries on Google, 3.9 billion on YouTube, 2.5 billion on Yahoo!, and 1.4 billion on Bing. (That makes YouTube the #2 search engine in the U.S.)

Yet despite the dominance of YouTube in popular culture and on the Internet, real estate professionals, for the most part, aren’t using it.

YouTube makes it easy to create a channel, allowing you to place all of your videos together in one place.  You can customize the channel with your company’s colors and logo, and you can upload the videos of your choosing to tell your story or showcase your properties.  Viewers can even subscribe, which allows them to stay up to date on your latest uploads.

Lots of companies and organizations have YouTube channels (click to view the White House Channel, for example).  Yet despite the popularity of YouTube and the simplicity of the channel concept, there seem to be only a handful of agents, brokers or boards using YouTube in any organized way.  (One very notable standout is the Houston Association of Realtors, which regularly posts content to YouTube.  Click here to visit their YouTube channel.)

Most of us think of YouTube as the place our kids go on the Internet to watch silly videos.  And while that may be true, it’s also the venue more and more businesses and professionals are using for marketing and PR.  It’s a powerful tool that reaches millions of people. So why is real estate absent?

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Showcase Your Listings with PowerSites™

selling homes, techtools tuesday Tagged with:
Feb 092010

TechTools Tuesday: Cool Tools to Sell Homes

PowerSites™ by AgencyLogic lets agents create single property websites which can show any home beautifully.

Easy to create and very affordable, PowerSites™ websites give you flexibility and many great features including:

  • A vanity URL dedicated to just that property
  • Large photos to grab the attention of prospective buyers
  • The ability to upload and caption as many as 100 photos of the property and surrounding community
  • Unlimited text so that you can describe the property in as much detail as you wish
  • Syndication to many of the major real estate search portals so prospective buyers can more easily find your listing

There’s even an optional PowerTalk “click-to-talk” feature that lets prospective buyers place a call to you directly from the property website.

To get an idea of the power of PowerSites™, take a look at how one professional is using it to market a home formerly owned by President and Mrs. Gerald Ford.

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Floorplan Tools Help Agents Sell Homes

marketing, selling homes, techtools tuesday, Web 2.0 Tagged with: ,
Jan 192010

TechTools Tuesday:  Cool Tools to Sell Homes

Prospective buyers who use the Internet to preview homes are often want to know what the homes are like on the inside. Photos and video tours can provide some information, but often it’s still hard for buyers to get a feel for room dimensions and home layout.

click for FloorPlanner demo

Two web 2.0 products now give prospective buyers that sense of space and dimension by allowing agents to include floorplans with their listing information.

Floorplanner lets agents create and share interactive 2-D or 3-D floorplans.  Using point-and-click, drag-and-drop tools, agents can easily create floorplans of their listings that can be saved, sent, printed, shared, or uploaded to their website.  To get an idea of how it works, click and watch the video above or try the free demo on the company’s website.

The interactive floorplan tours offered by FloorPlanOnline® let prospective buyers see a floorplan of the home and then click on various spots on the floorplan to see a photo of that room.  As they say themselves, “there’s no more guessing which photos go with which rooms.”  The company offers several different products and levels of service.  A self-service options, for example, lets agents submit their own photos and floorplan sketches which the company transforms into Internet and social media-ready floorplans with interactive tours.  Or, FloorPlanOnline® can send a professional to the home to take the photos and sketch the layout.  Click here to watch the video on their Fan Page or visit their website for a complete rundown of their products.

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An Agent's Technology To-Do List for 2010

social networking, technology-general Tagged with: ,
Jan 042010

It’s a New Year and that means it’s a good time to take stock of where you are with technology and marketing.  So to go along with your New Year’s Resolution, we offer this Technology To-Do List for 2010.

  1. Clean Out Your E-mail Inbox.  Seriously, do something with all those messages!  Put them in folders or delete them so that you can start the year fresh.  Ditto for the documents cluttering your desktop.
  2. Change Your Passwords.  It’s not a good idea to use the same password on all of the websites you visit and the passwords you do use should be changed from time to time. The start of a new year is a good time to change them.  See my article on password security and tips on how to remember your new passwords.
  3. Develop (or Review) Your Social Networking Strategy.  If you’re not actively social networking, you’re missing the potential to connect with hundreds of friends, former clients and would-be clients.  If you’re already active in social networking, consider what applications you use, how much time you spend, and what’s working and not working for you.  Adapt your strategy accordingly.
  4. Set Up Your Fan Page.  Make sure that your social networking strategy includes the creation of a Facebook Fan Page.  Fan Pages help you separate your professional self from your personal self and allow you establish and strengthen your professional brand.
  5. Organize Your Contacts.  Are there people you’ve been out of touch with?  Are there others you need to look for on Facebook or LinkedIn?  Are old names and e-mail addresses cluttering your contact list?  Take some time to clean out old information and to reconnect with people you haven’t seen or heard from in awhile.
  6. Create Your Marketing Plan. Where will you get business in 2010?  What can you do to make it more likely that people looking to buy or sell property this year will work with you?  Prepare a written plan that describes how much you intend to make this year and the specific things you intend to do to meet that income goal.
  7. Always Be Learning.  Technology never stands still and neither should you.  Determine what new skill or new technology you need to master this year and develop a plan for how you will learn it.
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7 Minimum Technology Skills for Modern Real Estate Agents

technology-general Tagged with: ,
Dec 042009

If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need it.  You probably already know how to do everything on this list and more.   But I’m guessing you know people—agents right in your office, no doubt—who are still living and working in the Dark Ages and who need this information.  This article is for them; share it with them.

These days, an agent who wants to make good use of technology and work effectively with clients needs to be able to do certain things.  Here’s my list of the minimum technology skills for today’s agent.

1. Own and use a laptop computer.

You don’t have to buy it yourself; someone else can do that for you.  But you should know how to:

  • Pick up a wireless Internet signal and log on to a wi-fi network.
  • Verify that your anti-virus software is up to date and working.
  • Manually back up any important information that’s on your hard drive or verify that any automatic backup feature that’s installed is up to date and working.

2. Use e-mail.

  • Maintain an e-mail address for professional purposes.
  • Know how to log on, check e-mail, reply to and forward messages, send and receive documents.
  • Check for messages at least twice a day.

3. Use a smartphone.

  • Maintain a cell phone account with a data plan and use a device that let’s you send and receive message when you’re not near a computer.

4. Know the basics of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (or the Mac equivalents).

  • Be able to create letters and simple documents in MS Word.
  • Be able to create simple graphs and charts using MS Excel.
  • Be able to create and give a presentation using MS PowerPoint.

5.  Maintain a profile on LinkedIn.

  • Have a LinkedIn profile with connections with others on the site
  • Update your status at least once a month.

6. Maintain a website or a blog.

  • Have, at the very least, your own website where prospects can see listings and search for properties.
  • Write a blog (preferable to having a traditional website) and post a new article at least once a week.

7.  Use Facebook and/or Twitter.

  • Maintain a regular Facebook account or Fan Page.  Post status updates at least 2-3 times per week.
  • Maintain a Twitter account.  Post a minimum of 10-15 messages per week.

What else should be included?

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