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?
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Have you seen all the buzz on Twitter yesterday about Facebook changing their TOS and now have the right to all our content, and that they can use it anyway they want? How does this effect all of us that have put RES on there, or pictures?
Sarah-
Thanks for all the instructions and for doing the testing for us!
Sarah-
Sorry to be so much trouble. I don’t seem to have an option to download a movie file. Is it because I’m on a Mac?
Sarah – Thanks for the help. It would be great if one of the options when posting the vid was a property pic vs logo or agent pic. Is that possible and I just need to know how?
thanks
Kathleen, whoa – I’m late! Sorry about that. I’m using a Mac too and I get the option. If you mean you don’t have the option in Facebook, try again. Their video upload is picky at times. If you’re having trouble finding it in Real Estate Shows, click Publish, then the Video tab to the upper left. This is where you create the video, then later can come back to download it. Be sure to unzip before trying to upload it in Facebook or Facebook won’t recognize it as a video file.
Tony, when adding it as a link to Facebook, Facebook automatically checks the page for images and asks which you want to use. Since the Show is flash based, Facebook doesn’t see them as photos and doesn’t give them as a selection. (Choosing the thumbnails at that point is actually in Facebook, not Real Estate Shows.)