Have you noticed the huge influx of new people to Facebook lately? If you’re connecting with more and more locals, old friends, family and even agents from across the country, you may have realized it’s not a bad idea to remind them that you’re still in real estate, actively marketing and selling homes and ready to help them with their own real estate needs.

Using your Real Estate Shows is an easy way to do just that. Real Estate Shows and Facebook get along beautifully, and you have a few choices in ways to share your Shows.

The first way is to turn on Social Bookmarking. To do that, go from your Manage page to Edit Show, then Edit Buttons. Scroll to the bottom of the page, click the box to Enable Social Bookmarking and submit. Watch your Show, and at the end click the Facebook button and follow the directions to upload to your Profile page. You’ll be able to choose from your agent photo, logo or no picture. Here’s how it looked on my page:

A bonus to this method is that ANYONE can use those Social Bookmarking buttons. If a buyer finds your Show while house hunting online and loves the house, it can be “saved” and shared via their Facebook page. Essentially, you’re allowing others to help you advertise the home.

To submit as I did above, you don’t have to convert your Show to video, as you will with the next two options. (Note: video is not available on trial accounts.) Converting your Show into a video format is easy – on the Manage page click Publish next to the Show you want, then click the Video tab to the upper left. If you have a YouTube account, you can enter in your log in information and we’ll upload your video directly to your account there. (I highly recommend sending your Shows to your own YouTube account, so that you’ll have your own branding and control of editing.) Video conversion takes anywhere from 10 minutes to several hours, depending on the number of requests we’re handling at the time. You’ll receive an email from us once it’s done.

If you decide you’d like to upload your video Real Estate Show directly to Facebook, which was my favorite option, go back to the Publish/Video page of Real Estate Shows and click the button you’ll find at the top of the page to download your video file to your computer. Unzip or extract the files and then you’re free to upload a video through the Add Video button on your Facebook profile. After my upload was complete, I edited and chose the “Full” option, which looked like this:

I really like the look of the larger picture representing the video, but the still shot was chosen for me from the middle of the Show. (I should mention that this larger version is the one that got a lot of a comments.  Since comments are the only gauge I have of traffic through a video sent this way, this was important to me.)

The third option is to simply link to YouTube after your Show has been uploaded there. To do this, just go to YouTube and grab the URL to your Show, then click on Post Link on your Facebook profile and paste. It looks like this:

Through your YouTube account, you can edit videos so that you can choose the sample photo that represents your video, but unfortunately you will only have a choice between three shots in the middle of the video, not at the beginning which would make the most sense for a listing. I’d have a lot more to tell you about using your Shows in YouTube … but that will have to wait for another post.

Any questions?

This is an example of a video file exported from Real Estate Shows and uploaded to Photobucket.

This Photobucket’s default embed size. It does not provide a full-screen viewing option.
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The simplest and most effective way to create real estate tours, is now the simplest and most effective way to get to video. With the push of a button, a Show created on RealEstateShows.com will be converted in to a video file that can be uploaded to any video distribution network, including YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, PhotoBucket and more.

“Our desire was to make it a ‘one button’ operation for our clients,” said Bill Leider, CEO of Real Estate Shows. ” Real Estate Shows is widely regarded as the easiest to use real estate tour product on the market. We’re proud that we’ve been able to add this option for our clients without sacrificing the ease of use that our clients love.”

Here is a sample Real Estate Show exported to video and uploaded to Flickr.

Here is what the original file looked like before uploading to Flickr: view original mp4 file.

At launch, Real Estate Shows users will also be able to automatically upload their video to their own YouTube channel, to the Real Estate Shows YouTube Channel, or both. Other automatic uploading options will be added shortly. In addition, the MP4 file can be downloaded to your hard drive and used anywhere video is accepted, including desktop-based video editing applications like iMove and Adobe Premiere.

“The option to export to video opens up a whole range of distribution options for real estate listings,” added Jeff Turner, President and Founder of Real Estate Shows. “And our clients now have options for distribution of Shows that have nothing to do with listings. We’re already seeing some very creative uses of Real Estate Shows in the video format on Flickr and YouTube. We’re very happy to see our first users gravitate so quickly and easily to new ways to use the product.”

The export to video option will be included in the current $125 per year retail price of Real Estate Shows for all user who renew or sign up for the service before January 1, 2009. After that date, users who wish to be able to export to video will be required to pay an additional $25 per year to access the feature. The feature is currently in public beta. Please alert us immediately if you find any problems at all.

How do you export your Real Estate Show to video?

To create a video from your Real Estate Show, click on the “create a video” button in side the video tab under your publish menu for any Show you wish to export. Here is a short instructional video that will show you were to find the create a video options.

Here is an example of how a Real Estate Show looks when uploaded to Flickr.

Here is an example of how a Real Estate Show looks when uploaded to YouTube.

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