Yesterday I was speaking to a customer and they asked me why would they want to post videos to YouTube.  This lead to a great discussion on the merits of video marketing and the value of YouTube in particular.

Some of our take away points:

• YouTube is the second largest search engine in the U.S. – behind only Google (it’s owner)
• YouTube passed 20 Billion pageviews/month in October 2011
• The average YouTube user watches 7 hours of video per month
• YouTube can push Videos to Facebook and Twitter
• You can put links to Virtual Tours and your site in video descriptions

So even if only 1 percent of the pageviews on YouTube are real estate related that is still 200 Million pageviews a month.  This is 200 Million opportunities per month to promote your listings or promote yourself as the real estate agent of choice.

Why wouldn’t you post videos to YouTube?

Over the last month we have made a number of small enhancements to Digital Home Info.  These enhancements include:

• Music on the YouTube Real Estate Videos – If you have selected a music file to play on your Virtual Tour then the music will now be included in the YouTube video that we generate.
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• Panoramic photos are now included in the YouTube Real Estate Videos – Our YouTube videos will now scan panoramic from right to left.
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• Email Photo Uploading – We have made the process of uploading and inserting photos into an email easier.  The process now directly inserts the photo into the email instead of having to drag and drop it from the gallery on the right side of the screen.
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• Email Photo Gallery – You select photos from your photo gallery and insert them directly into the email at full size instead of having to resize them once they are inserted.
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• Photo Trim – Sometimes photos imported from an IDX feed will have whitespace on the edges, especially if it is a vertical photo.  This whitespace just doesn’t look right so we have placed a “Trim” link under each photo that will replace the whitespace with black space.  This looks much better in the Virtual Tour.

If you haven’t yet had a chance, check out these enhancements and let us know what you think.

*NOTE – music has not been added to existing videos.  To rebuild your video for existing listings rearrange the order of your listing photos in the gallery (make sure to restore the desired order).

We are commonly asked if our Virtual Tours support panoramic images. Yes, our Virtual Tours do support panoramic images.  The steps below show you how to upload and set parameters on panoramic images.

1. Login to the Digital Home Info portal.
2. Click on the “Listings” tab.
3. Click on the “Edit” link for the listing that you are working with.
4. On the “Edit Property” page select the “Gallery” tab.
5. Press the “Add New Images” button.
6. Press the “Browse” button to find and select the desired image.
7. Press the “Upload” button.
8. Once the image has upload (it will be removed from the list) close the upload screen by clicking on the “X” in the upper right corner.
9. When the screen refreshes the panoramic will be in the list of images. Under the thumbnail of the panoramic, click on the “Edit Info” link. This will show a pop up screen.
10. In the pop up you can:
1. Add an Image Title
2. Add an Image Description
3. Change the time in seconds that an image is displayed on the Virtual Tour.
4. Change the direction an image moves in the Virtual Tour.
11. For a wide panoramic image select “Left to Right / Right to Left” in the “Direction of Image” drop down list.
12. Press the “Save” button.

Do you like panoramic photos in your virtual tours?  Did you know that there is software available at no charge that will automatically stitch your photos together?  Microsoft has released ICE (Image Composite Editor).  This is a program that can be used to edit photos, stitch and crop images.  Some of the features include:

• Accelerated stitching on multiple CPU cores
• Support for “structured panoramas” — panoramas consisting of hundreds of photos taken in a rectangular grid of rows and columns
• No image size limitation — stitch gigapixel panoramas
• Photoshop layer and large document support
• Automatic exposure blending
• Choice of planar, cylindrical, or spherical projection
• Orientation tool for adjusting panorama rotation
• Automatic cropping to maximum image area
• Native support for 64-bit operating systems
• Wide range of output formats, including JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PNG, HD Photo

So if you want an easy way to make panoramic images check out Microsoft’s ICE.

According to the infographic (by FIXR) below Social Media is delivering a greater ROI than Blogging.  Have you experienced this?

The inforgraphic below outlines how the iPad has changed the work habits of REALTORS®. Has it changed yours?

Real Estate Marketing was altered forever with the advent of Social Media.  REALTORS® are using social media more and more every day to promote their listings.  The infographic below (put together by POSTLING) outlines how the Real Estate Industry is using Social Media.

As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance and improve the Digital Home Info Real Estate Marketing Platform we have recently released a few new features.  A new small sized virtual tour that is ideal for displaying small images and auto-trim and correct photo processing.

The new small virtual tour has all of the same features as our larger animated virtual tour (Home Information, Google Maps, Mortgage Calculator, Appointment Scheduler, Auto-generated PDF Flyer, and photo browser) it is just optimized for smaller files sizes.  We have noticed that many of our agents use photos from their local IDX system and that these photos tend to be around 640px by 480px.  Although these looked good in the larger virtual tour, sometimes you could tell that a photo had been stretched to make it fit right.  So we created this version to match the need.  If you upload your own photos or your photos are large you can still use the larger virtual tour. We just wanted to provide another option so that you can get the most out of our service.

Something else we noticed with the IDX photos was that they sometimes contained whitespace (borders) around the edges.  So we set out to find a way to remove the whitespace without altering the photo.  This is where Auto Trim comes into the picture. Now you can simply click on the “Trim” link under each photo in your gallery and Digital Home Info will automatically remove the whitespace. This greatly improves the presentation of the virtual tour since the white is no longer there to detract from the overall presentation.

We will be blogging how to’s on both of these new features in the coming days so look for those soon.  If you have any suggestions or comments please let us know.

• More than 7 Million new privately owned housing units were authorized from Sept. 2009 to Sept. 2010
• The Median price of a home is up 7x over 1940.
• It would take the average american household 4 years to save enough money to buy a median priced home, if they spent on nothing else.