Are you using YouTube to market your apartments?

Using YouTube is critical in apartment marketing since it is now the 2nd most frequently used search engine next to Google.

How are you using YouTube? To Get leads, capture leads, follow up, or resident retention? Maybe all of these. Specific examples are great!

If not, what are your biggest concerns?

As a community manager we used YouTube a lot, in conjunction with our Craigslist ads. We'd create short viral videos, (different from the standard video tour) that were funny and entertaining and would get a customer's attention; and then place the link for the videos on our Craigslist advertising. We got really good results for it.

I just wrote an e-book on how we did this in my community. If you like, here is the link to the book. The book is free!

www.relationshipdifference.com/wp-conten...ce-Rommel-Anacan.pdf

All the best!
Rommel

We introduced videos to our 44 properties this year through several contests (one each month). The categories included Advertise Your Community, Your Passion Outside 8-5, How Your Team Stays Motivated, Your Teams Participation in SGK, etc. Obviously, we had many that concentrated on their teams more than their community. We have found when introducing something new that if we start with using it to highlight our teams and our culture, we get instant buy in and participation. Now we have all these videos and one big fat challenge: We have a company YouTube channel and have linked all the videos that were made onto playlists. But, we don't actually have the video, right? So, if the creator leaves the company, they can also delete their video. And we can't improve the title or add keywords. So, how are companies dealing with this challenge? We are considering many options, yet the best seems to be formal training on how to select a good title and keywords and then allow them to upload the video to our channel using a temporary password. Otherwise, my marketing resources are left with challenge of optimizing videos when we are already tight on resources.

Thoughts?

Have you all seen ShowMyProperty.tv ?

Here is an example of one of our viral-type videos:

Hi Stephanie,

What you have done is phenomenal! Some might call it crowdsourcing. I love the idea of empowering your teams to create their own videos. Real video marketing starts at the community level, and should be created there.
As far as your problem, instead of or in addition to having your teams upload their videos to YouTube, have them save them or upload them to a common file. Choose the best ones and promote them, tag them, etc. Otherwise, formal training is a great idea. Why not create a video showing the whole process that team members can watch at their leisure? Or you could outsource it, there are several outlets that will handle this for you relatively inexpensively if the producing and editing is already done.

Let me know if I didn't understand you correctly.

Thanks again for sharing!

Stephanie,

Yeah, tough to address the keyword issue without having access to the actual video file to upload. If the creators are willing to, they can share the file with you via a service like Dropbox (for free) and allow you to download your own copy.

Once you have your own copy of the video files, you can upload to your company YouTube Channel and optimize with rich keywords. Make sure you do this for your titles, descriptions, and tags.

Tip: Before uploading your video, rename the file to include keywords for SEO.

YES: luxury-apartment-downtown-los-angeles.mov
NO: video-4ab.mov

Hope this helps!

What about using videos for resident testimonials? Has anyone done this or have examples?

Here's a video we produced for a senior community that utilized resident testimonials.

Does anyone have a policy that they have their employees sign prior to letting them go out and use the cameras? We have just purchased cameras for all of our properties to use for a variety of reasons but I feel like there should be a policy regarding the use of them in place before delivering them. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!