Where and How to Share Your Videos

Different social media platforms serve different audiences, so you should know which ones will best meet your real estate objectives when sharing your video content. You don’t have to be on every single social media platform for your content to be effective; until you investigate how actively your audience is engaging with you on each, focus only on the ones where your targeted buyers and sellers spend most of their time.

Here are tips for sharing your videos on four social media platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube — as well as your own website.

Which videos work best in each platform?

Facebook

With the largest user base of any social media platform, Facebook plays well with all kinds of content. According to the company, it’s generating 8 billion video views per day, so it’s a safe bet that the meet-our-team, how-to and neighborhood overview videos you post — along with home tours — will get face time with your audience.

Twitter

A tweet’s 140-character limit forces users to be economical with their messages, so posts should be more about sparking a conversation rather than encapsulating one. Also, Twitter is all about “now,” so the more immediate and interesting your Twitter content, the more people will retweet it. Clever, conversational and timely is the key to winning videos on Twitter.

Instagram

With its focus on curating visual content, Instagram was built to help you tell stories that show who you are and what you’re all about. The most successful brands on the site post lush, intriguing and personal imagery, drawing viewers in so they want to see more. Share your best quality, professionally shot videos on Instagram.

YouTube

YouTube might be an old-timer, but don’t put it out to pasture just yet. As a powerful search engine, the site has more than a billion users, and the number of people watching YouTube content every day has increased 40 percent year-over-year in the past two years. Home tours and videos where viewers learn something — for example, a neighborhood’s unique features or how-to content — are the top video types that crush it on YouTube.

Your website

All of your marketing efforts should ultimately drive traffic to your own website, which should be rich with informative and engaging content. Like Facebook, your site is an ideal platform to share nearly any video topic, as long as it’s relevant to your business and brand, and appropriate for all the audiences you want to reach.

What to know about uploading videos

As you shoot videos and decide which platform you’ll use to share them, keep in mind that most sites limit the length of your video content. Although there are workarounds that allow you to post longer videos, as a rule, Facebook videos can be as long as 60 minutes, Twitter videos can be up to 30 seconds long, Instagram allows up to 60 seconds and YouTube videos can be up to 15 minutes. Whatever video length is permitted, however, remember that people stay only as long as the content appeals to them.

Facebook

When you add a video to Facebook, upload it natively so that it lives in your content. Facebook gives significantly more importance to native videos than to videos that link out to third-party sites; this is also called “reach,” and the higher a video’s reach, the more likes, shares and comments it can generate.

Twitter

You can record, edit and share videos from the Twitter app; remember that you can always shoot separate scenes, then use drag and drop to experiment with the order. If you import a video from a device’s library, use the Twitter app to trim it to 30 seconds before before sharing it in a tweet.

Instagram

Like Twitter, you can record Instagram videos through the app on your smartphone, then upload it to the site. You can also upload content directly to Instagram from your phone’s video library.

YouTube

When you upload a video to YouTube, take a moment to add a catchy title and relevant tags. People searching for that content will easily find yours using keywords.

Your website

Unlike videos on Facebook, self-hosting videos on your own website isn’t always ideal. Server bandwidth, large file sizes and limited storage space can affect the time it takes videos to load — if they load at all — and cause disruptions in the playback. To give consumers the best viewing experience, have a third-party site like YouTube host your videos.

Buyers and sellers are actively seeking your brand, wanting to hear what you have to say — and videos are a great way to attract and engage them. You didn’t put all your time, thought and effort into creating videos only for them to wind up languishing, unwatched, on your social media pages. Share your content the right way and on the sites where your audience spends its time.