YouTube Tips, Tricks, and Lessons learned

There is a post going already on good uses of YouTube. Now, I'd like to start a discussion on some of the things that you have learned to make your videos better.

What I have learned so far:

1. Get over yourself
When I first made my first video, I was embarrassed of my narrations. I said shelving units over three times and the lighting was terrible. While these things can be embarrassing, most people will not even notice.


2. Don't let equipment or money be your excuse
I film all of our videos using my iPhone. The quality is so so and often very jerky. I always thought that we would have to hire someone to make a quality video and yet they simply work. Think of all the videos you watch on YouTube, how often do you judge the quality. People trust and a respect a honest unit walk through. I get told often that the one reason they came to view an apartment is because of our video tours.



3. Picture videos don't cut it
Putting together a slideshow in my opinion is just lazy. Be a little creative. People want to see the actual unit, not just a couple pictures.

4. Tags, demographics, and traffic
It takes time for the information to come in but be sure to track your analytics. My video's are mostly watched by older women. Knowing this now, I will format my video's differently towards that demographics in my next tour. Track how people find your videos. I found that a good majority found mine from searching for a competing complex. I then formatted my tags to grab attention from other apartment community searches.

What have you learned? What mistakes have you made? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Nicholas,

When our company first came up with the idea of creating walk-through video tours per floor plan specific, we knew right away the best video player to use would be Youtube. Reason being, everyone can get on the website and you dont need to download like WMP or Quicktime to be able to watch the video.

Also, Youtube is mobile friendly. So when a future tenant is looking for a place and drive up to a community where no one is available because they are on a showing, the prospect could scan a qr code that takes them to youtube to watch the video on their phone.

This is how we use Youtube -

Hope this is the feedback you were looking for.

Nofel Molai