3 Reasons Realtors Should be Marketing on YouTube

Real estate marketing on YouTube? 

It may seem crazy, but it’s a fantastic medium for real estate agents.

The goal for any real estate agent is to find a fresh, exciting marketing platform that can render their properties and business in a new, enticing manner to potential clients, and Internet video, YouTube specifically, is a fabulous way to accomplish such a goal.

Though it may seem strange to equate “YouTube” and “business” in the same breath – this is, after all, the domain of cute cats, laughing babies and FailBlog – but YouTube really is a great medium for business, especially real estate-related business, and we’re going to list three reasons why in our first story on YouTube.

Real Estate Marketing on YouTube: 3 Reasons

Reason One: YouTube is Darned Popular
Marketing is almost always the most effective when it utilizes a popular medium, and the popularity of YouTube and Internet video on the whole is exploding. Not only is YouTube the second most popular search engine on the Internet by volume, but according to the latest numbers from Nielsen, Americans stream as much as 15 billion videos a month, and Internet video has increased in viewings by 35 percent year-over-year. And if that weren’t enough, the CISCO VNI Benchmark Report estimates that Internet video traffic will make up 54 percent of all consumer traffic by 2016. So for its popularity alone, you should be strongly considering YouTube marketing.

Reason Two: Efficiency
Real estate is a numbers game – the price of residences, the amount of property taxes, commission rates, etc. – but it’s also a strongly sensuous field, meaning the senses play a huge role in the appeal of a property; and video is able to efficiently incorporate many different sensory details in a short span of time. Just think: In a 30-second video, you could show the image of a property and the sounds of its landscape, along with textual information about the home and even still images to further complement your video. And all that information can be edited and syndicated for not just YouTube, but iTunes, Pinterest, Flickr, Facebook and your personal website and blog.

Reason Three: The Human Touch
One of the struggles of real estate is capturing the emotion of a property, the spark that allows potential homebuyers to see themselves as the home’s new owner. Video can be a great way to capture that in how it emphasizes the human touch. You can speak on video; you can appear on camera; you can emphasize certain qualities of the property; you can play music, etc. Altogether, you can utilize a wide number of tools to fully show why a home is right for someone!

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, though, because as with any form of marketing, there are severe pitfalls to using YouTube and Internet video for your marketing needs. As Rich Brooks pointed out on Social Media Examiner, 35 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute; how can you stand out and produce great videos? That will be the focus of our next article!

Courtesy of Chicago Agent Magazine - http://ow.ly/iZixR