zillow.com Introduces Video Tutorials

Video listings from agents and brokers are growing in popularity, and zillow.com already links to agent’s virtual tours and videos. This week zillow.com has also introduced a new kind of video to its website.

The US property valuation site and portal has produced an instructional video about Zillow Advice, its Q+A forum on the website, that is hosted on YouTube, but appears on the company’s blog as a tutorial.

It is the first in a series of how-to videos that zillow.com says it will be releasing over the next few weeks.

It is not the company’s first foray into YouTube and video. zillow.com has been active on the video website for around two years now. These new tutorial videos will join the 19 other videos on zillow.com’s YouTube channel. Many of these existing videos are interviews with key players, opinion style pieces and one-offs from company events.

zillow.com’s Partner Relations Manager, Sara Bonert, writes on the company’s blog about the thinking behind the new tutorial series:

“Our hope is that the videos will give you a better understanding on how to use the various features and tools available on Zillow when connecting with the 8.5 million+ people who visit our site each month.”

It seems that zillow.com is taking a new direction with video and using it as part of a coherent marketing plan to promote the website and explain how users can get the best out of it. It’s certainly one route open to portals who want to use video.

Data from the January 2009 comScore Video Metrix service shows the increasing popularity of online video. In January 2009 US Internet users viewed 14.8 billion online videos – an increase of 4 percent on December 2008. YouTube led the growth, accounting for 91 percent of the incremental gain as it surpassed 100 million viewers for the first time.

You can watch the first video in this new series (presented by Sara Bonert) below:

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