YouTube.com is an online video sharing network.  YouTube is a powerful channel to disseminate videos, it accounts for 42% of the online video viewing market. YouTube is also the second largest search engine in the world. There are more searches done on Youtube than Yahoo.  Each day more than 5 Billion videos are watched.

In order to leverage YouTube as a marketing medium Toronto real estate agents have to start developing video content. This video content could be related to promoting individual listings or your personal brand.

Video tours of listings is a great way to get content onto YouTube and can be a very effective tool in the marketing of your listings. These videos can be shot on a $250 HD pocket video camera (Vado is the recommended camera) by the agent as they walk through talking about the property.  Julie Kinnear does a great job at this.

Video can also be an effective medium to support your personal branding. It is a great tool because you can convey a great amount of information through a very effective medium. Web users are more prone to watch a 3 minute video vs. read a 500 word article. The same rules apply here as they do with all the other social media networks; you need to focus on providing good quality engaging content. There are a number of different topics that you can cover off in your videos:

  • Advice for buyers and/or sellers. Think about the questions your clients ask you on a daily basis. That is a great source for ongoing video topics.
  • Video testimonials are also incredibly powerful and you would be surprised how willing clients are to do this for their agent
  • Interview subject matter experts. Pick people in your network that are specialists in areas related to real estate. Interview them and focus on asking questions that you think your clients or potential clients might have. These specialist could be real estate lawyers, mortgage brokers, or even contractors or architects. Once you have posted the video send it to the person you interviewed and encourage them to share it with their friends and colleagues.

To take full advantage of YouTube you will have to set up your own channel and upload your videos to that channel. Don worry it is just as easy as setting up profiles on other social networks. Its important to position your channel to support your brand positioning and also to drive traffic back to your website or blog.

As you record your different video start each one with quick one or two sentences about who you are and where they can find more information. It is also very important to fill out the title, description, and tags for each video as you upload them. I would recommend that you try and gear it to be as geographically specific as possible i.e. Toronto or neighbourhood. Also include a link to your website or blog in each description. This will help drive traffic from YouTube to your website or blog where you have a greater ability to convert that traffic into a lead.

Engage other YouTube users and encourage your network to subscribe to your channel, comment on your videos, rank your videos, and add you to their favourites. The more activity your videos and channel the higher your videos will come up in the search results. You can encourage other YouTube channel owners to engage you by taking the first step and engaging them as there is a strong sense of reciprocity on YouTube amongst the channel owners.

This is the last posting as it relates to specific social networks. The next posting will discuss where agents go from here.