Consumers habits continue to change and one of the biggest trends is the continued errosion of our attention spans and desire to read.  In fact a recent study showed that the average human’s attention span is 7 seconds and the average gold fish is 8, so we now have a shorter attention span than a gold fish.  In fact 77% of people will avoid a webpage that has more than 600 words.  This is not a trend, this is human physiology.  The human brain can interpret and understand an image 60,000 times faster than it can convert words.

And Google is very aware of how this is changing the way people use the internet and has always placed an emphasis on video, but recently have ramped things up and given it much more weight in their algorithm.  In fact a video is 52 times more likely to get on a page one search result than a website is and that is just in the Web tab that includes all kinds of results (websites, pictures, videos, articles, etc.) and that doesn’t even factor in the fact that search engines like Google have a totally separate Video tab in the search (see screen shots below).

And that doesn’t even account for the fact there are millions of people searching for video on sites like YouTube.  In fact, YouTube is now the 2nd largest search engine behind Google and of course with Google owning/running YouTube, they definitely videos on YouTube preferrential treatment/ranking on the Google Search Engine.

And they aren’t just looking for funny videos of cats playing pianos, I’ve always said YouTube is the greatest teacher on earth because you can learn anything you want as someone has created a how to video on just about anything and put it on YouTube.

So that is the first area of opportunity because real estate is a very complex and confusing industry so it is ripe for educational videos to help the consumer through the process.  Another area of need would be videos of properties.  In fact Postling did a study recently that showed 73% of consumers not only want, but expect their REALTOR to shoot video of their property and only 12% of REALTORS do it.  You can also do videos on your area (cities, communinities, etc.), do personal commercials, client testimonials, etc.  In otherwords, the opportunities to incorporate video into your real estate business are endless and YouTube makes it so easy to do video its ridiculous and it has such a strong impact on your search engine ranking, if you haven’t started doing it yet, you need to start doing it now!