MediaPost’s Video Insider has an interesting post about the potential of online video classifieds. Having just survived apartment seeking in Berkeley, I can attest to the need for this (blurry, cherry-picked pictures of an apartment can be very misleading), and am surprised it hasn’t taken off. Currently, Craigslist doesn’t allow video embeds (lame), despite the plethora of video sharing sites that could host the videos for free. Some local newspapers are stepping into the fray, as are several newer sites like RealPeopleRealStuff.com and iMoondo.com. But Craigslist’s dominance isn’t likely to go away, precisely because they are so dominant–the benefits of everyone posting/viewing classifieds in the same place can often outweigh how cool the classified site is (economists call this “network externalities”) which, alas, leaves us at Craigslist’s mercy.
We wrote in a previous post about the bevy of savvy real estate companies utilizing TubeMogul to distribute videos of home tours to boost their organic search rankings (so a search for homes for sale in a given city or neighborhood might pull up a video tour on YouTube, in addition to the text listing). With housing prices tumbling due to the subprime fallout, competing in web video, once novel, is now a must (not to mention being free). On that front, The Future of Real Estate Marketing blog reports that Century 21 recently launched a YouTube channel, with owners submitting tour videos of their homes (i.e. below). Of course, online real estate video pioneers, such as our friends at WellcomeMat (who featured us in their “Top 50″ marketing tools for real estate), saw this coming.
As I wrote in a previous post, the use of video over the internet has quickly become a requirement for marketing. But how do you do it? We here at TubeMogul have compiled what we’ve learned by watching your successes (and failures), and put it in this report, “Web Video Marketing - Best Practices.” We even share with you a formula that we feel helps weight where to allocate your efforts in creating a video and putting it online. We do this with lack of regard for our safety, as we’re certain there will be those with strong opinions against such a formula. We welcome you to share what you think, whatever form that takes!
We were pleased to make the “Top 50 Online Ways to Market Real Estate” (Jamie Glenn’s full pdf presentation can be found here) put out by the new video marketing website geared towards real estate sellers and business owners, WellcomeMat.
You can also watch a version of Jamie Glenn’s video presentation below (it’s a video of him giving the powerpoint linked above).
WellcomeMat leads a growing list of new sites that use web video to market real estate. You can either upload a video of your own, or hire a videographer through the site to film your video, and upload it to their site to begin your web video marketing. There’s a great geotagging feature which shows your business or real estate listing on an interactive map. On the site, you can see the thumbtack on the map that represents our company in Berkeley, CA, and clicking through takes you to our channel.
Check it out!
