Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
As a social media platform, YouTube is a major component of any real estate professional’s marketing strategy. Video marketing is an incredibly effective tool for raising brand awareness and building a reputation for yourself as an authority, and YouTube is a fantastic avenue for doing so.
That’s why it was nothing but good news when YouTube recently announced that it’s bringing new quality-of-life changes like channel display options to the platform. These new capabilities are poised to help creators of all types - real estate professionals included - drive engagement with visitors and viewers. Let’s take a closer look!
The first big change rolling out is how YouTube will be handling content recommendations for users visiting a creator’s channel. The new “For You” shelf will be personalized according to a visitor’s viewing history, topic affinity, and other types of variables. These new personalization options are poised to make a real difference for channels that host multiple content formats or topics languages, according to YouTube.
What does this mean for your YouTube channel? Now, visitors will get more customized displays of the content you have on offer that they’re more likely to be interested in watching. This has the potential to increase engagement, making your channel a more effective marketing tool. You’ll also get to choose exactly what content types to include for fine-tuning what you present to visitors.
The new personalization options are likely to be a big plus, but there are more changes coming your way soon as well. First up is how the “sort by oldest” channel filter is making a comeback after it was phased out in 2022. YouTube did away with the feature when it added separate filters for both Live Streams and Shorts, but now, after some hard work, this search option is back.
Channel displays are going to be cleaner and more streamlined as well, as YouTube will begin hiding tabs that don’t have any content or where that content is already accessible in other elements of a channel. Playlists, for example, will be hidden automatically until a channel populates a playlist. The About tab is also being phased out, as the information that usually is reserved for that will be now integrated with the channel description.
Less clutter is a good thing, as fewer distractions mean that visitors to your channel will find your content more accessible without being distracted. But YouTube is also adding some new elements as well. First up includes a “Courses” tab for any channel that enables the feature and the ability to add links to header overviews.
Audio content on YouTube is also getting a visibility boost with both a “Releases” tab for musicians looking to promote their newest albums and tracks as well as a “Podcast” tab for the rest of us without musical talent. Real estate professionals are obviously going to be more interested in the latter, as if you do host or participate in podcasts, your visitors will be able to find that content much more easily.
Granted, all of these newly-slated updates aren’t going to shake the foundations of heaven and completely revamp the way you use YouTube for video marketing. Yet there’s much to be said about even the simplest and most straightforward quality-of-life changes like these, as the potential for improving visitor interaction and discovery simply can’t be underestimated. Simplifying channel displays and process streamlining might be small differences, but they’re significant, and they’ll have a cumulative effect on the performance of your channel.
As a result, the overall effectiveness of your YouTube video marketing is likely to increase - provided you’re sharing the right types of content to the platform. Using YouTube effectively is all about providing added value to visitors looking for information on the sector of the real estate market you’ve focused on. Likewise, leveraging your videos by sharing them on other social media platforms where you have a presence, like Facebook and Twitter, will further increase your marketing effectiveness.
In the real estate industry, it’s absolutely crucial that you distinguish yourself so that you stand out from the crowd. There are plenty of other real estate agents and businesses out there, and they’re all competing for the same clients that you are. While market specialization will help ensure you’re a bigger fish in a smaller pond, you’re still going to need all the help you can get when it comes to raising awareness of your brand and presenting yourself as a trusted authority in that specialization.
Video marketing accomplishes this task like none other. If a picture is worth a thousand words, video content is worth even more. You can use YouTube videos to showcase properties, neighborhoods, and community events while at the same time demonstrating your own expertise with your chosen market. You can live stream Q&A sessions and provide answers for people interested in learning the intricacies of buying or selling property. And perhaps most importantly, you can show your audience that you’re more than just a name on a business card or a face on a billboard. These are the sort of things that help you differentiate yourself from all the other real estate professionals out there - and that means knowing YouTube’s capabilities inside and out.
