Buying or selling a home involves a lot of emotional and subjective decisions. Before these transactions even take place, real estate professionals need to work with these decisions and get creative to even get in front of these buyers and sellers in the first place.

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Without a doubt, real estate video marketing is one of the best ways to appeal to the emotional, subjective factors that come with just about every transaction. Just like any other form of marketing though, poor video marketing methods can turn off a buyer or seller just as quickly as it reels them in.

In this article, we are going to provide some useful tips on how to make a viral real estate video that can attract more buyers and sellers for your business.

What is a Viral Real Estate Video?

Viral videos are not just amateur videos of cats doing funny things or parodies of pop songs. Actually, some of the best viral videos have been professionally produced by companies in an effort to reach their audience in a different way.

In the case of real estate, a viral video is one that creatively promotes a property, real estate company and/or Realtor by using content that draws attention and encourages viewers to want to share it with others.

You won’t find many better examples that epitomize the definition of a viral estate video than the example provided below. This is a video created by Josh Altman, a luxury real estate specialist of Hilton & Hyland, that was meant to raise money for a charity. Not only did it do that, but it quickly became viral with over 1 million views (and counting).

What Makes a Real Estate Video Go Viral?

So what did Josh accomplish in his video above that made it so viral?

Viral videos, especially in what can sometimes be a very conservative industry, need to be made up of one, or most, of the following characteristics to achieve the reach that Josh’s video has thus far.

For real estate videos to go viral they should be….

• Funny. One of the easiest ways to get a video to go viral is to make it funny. The tricky part though is figuring out what funny is to your target audience. There’s nothing worse than a video that tries to be funny, but is either tasteless or way off the mark so make sure you know your audience well.
• Creative. The best way to tell if you have something creative is when someone else sees it and says “Ah, I wish I thought of that!” Creativity is respected in just about every social circle and can do a fantastic job at getting viewers more interested in you.
• Short. If you go through some of the most viral videos on YouTube you will notice that most of them are less than 5 minutes long. Viral videos spread quickly due in large part to the fact that most of them are easy to digest and watch multiple times.
• Provocative. Whether some want to accept it or not, sex sells. And even though the real estate industry tries to maintain a conservative persona, the fact is that sex is used to sell real estate all the time – because it works.
• Memorable. You know you’re video has gone viral when people start referring to it by name. There’s no better current example of this than “Gangnam Style” by Psy (a Korean Pop Star). With over 240 million views and 2.4 million likes this catchy, memorable music video has already become one of the most viral videos of all time.

Top Tips to Help Your Video Go Viral

Unless you’re lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with your video camera, then you’re going to need to do some hard work to create a truly viral real estate video. Here are some of our top tips to help you get there:

• Craft your video around your target audience by using the proper language, content and humor
• Upload your video to a social platform like YouTube or Vimeo so you, and your viewers, can easily share and interact with it
• Give it a descriptive, but memorable title – just as you would for a blog post you’d want people to share
• Keep your company branding and logos to just subtle references
• Don’t use annoying annotations, ads or captions
• Use a celebrity (actor, athlete, musician) in your video if possible
• Optimize it for increased organic search value to drive even more traffic to it
• Use social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and LinkedIn to get your video in front of people

Primarily, a viral real estate video is intended to take a topic and add another edge to it, to reveal an amusing and fun side to the company. People are more likely to share a video if it meets the characteristics outlined above and you carry out the tips listed here.

Here is another great example of a viral real estate video – one that happens to meet a lot of the characteristics and tips outlined above: