Add the floor plan tour and video into your own site. The tour is complete with clickable camera icons, level navigation and a button to pop the tour in a new tab. You can also embed our video. Works with a WordPress blog post or page, and should work on other sites where you can use “embed” code, similar to a YouTube video code. It is as easy as copying and pasting…really!
See the video below or check out out under our Support pages.
We have updated our Facebook app for the recent changes made by Facebook for the new Timeline feature. The update includes making it easier to add the app into your own Facebook business page, but also a wider page view. See our video for how to add our app to your Facebook business page.
We just updated our iPad tour with a couple of new features.
1. Swipe on the photos. Now you can just use your finger to swipe through images.
2. New Embed FloorPlan view. In addition to the side by side view (photos next to floor plans), you can click the button to see a larger floor plan with photos that pop on top of the floor plan. This enhancement will be added soon to the newer tour templates as well.
To read more about the best iPad tour viewer out there, including how to project the tour to any TV connected to an Apple TV, click here.
We are pleased to announce we have integrated our service with xpressdocs, a leader in print marketing. How, you can get your FloorPlanOnline property flyer commercially printed and shipped right to your door. Plus, you can import the photos and floor plans in our system to xpressdocs, and create your own flyer using any xpressdcos template. These include 1, 2 and 4 page flyers and brochures, or even just listed postcards.
Click Here to see our Help Video on the process.
To send your flyer to xpressdocs, just go to Manage Tours, select Edit Tour on the right under Tour Actions, and then Edit Flyer. Go to the bottom and select Save and Download Flyer. Once the flyer has been regenerated, you will see a new section where you can Send to Printer. Click the button.
For first time users without an existing xpressdocs account, a new account will be created for you – just confirm the information, including your shipping address. If your company already uses xpressdocs, their system should take you through a process to confirm you office. If you edit your floorplanonline profile, we have added a new field for the Office ID. That should speed the process.
You are buying from xpressdocs, so you will need to add or confirm you payment information.
Here is an interesting blog post from comScore – 2012 U.S. Digital Future in Focus a report detailing how fast the tablet market is growing, and how it has zoomed passed the growth lines of other tech tools. According to PewInternet, the number of eReaders and tablet users DOUBLED between mid-December and January of 2012. Wow…a popular holiday gift, it seems.
PEW Research Center
As it stands now, there are over 35 million tablets in use in the United States, some 19% of adults own some kind of tablet. Mobile use is also increasing. Companies like Zillow and Realtor.com also report a significant number of users over the weekends come from mobile devices. According to comScore, 20% of holiday shoppers used their smartphones to check prices while at a brick and mortar store. This includes scanning bar codes and QR codes, those funny looking square boxes we have on our property fliers. BestBuy and other retailers are starting to incorporate the use of QR codes more and more at the point of sale….so could QR codes be hitting the mainstream?
Luckily, FloorPlanOnline has tools to meet these growing demands. We recently launched our exclusive iPad Tabbed Tour. You can see most tour content, including the interactive floor plan, video and more, just by opening the tour up on your iPad. You can even connect your iPad to a TV connected to an Apple TV to show it off on the big screen. Pretty cool. Read more on that here. P.S. it works on other tablet devices too.
We also serve up a mobile tour for smartphones so the user can see basic listing content, including an image of the floor plan.
Finally, we automatically create a QR code for each listing. You can easily add it to any flyer and it is available as a download under marketing tools in your account. This helps reduce paper costs by allowing people to scan the code on your flyer in a flyer box for more info.
We are also exploring more advanced mobile tools….so stay tuned!
If you would like to see the comScore report, please see this video.
We recently launched our iPad tour design that is a complete re-write of our code, specifically for the iPad. It utilizes what is called HTML5 and features a complete interactive floor plan where you can point and click your way through the property using your iPad. If you have an iPad, just type in one of your tour links into Safari and see how it looks. Or just use our demo house address of www.111anystreet.com.
Now, we are pleased to announce you can also use this same design as your PC/laptop tour viewer! To select this as your tour template, just select the Tabbed Tour as your tour frame type on the form as you create a new 
tour, or on Edit Details for existing tours. If you want this as your default tour frame going forward, just edit your profile and select the Tabbed Tour as your default tour frame.
Not only is the design clean and simple, it is a great solution for listings with very large floor plans as well! The floor plan area is much larger, and because it does adjust to the screen resolution, it can make the floor plan look very large. In addition, we are working to add another way to look at the floor plan to show it in the whole content area, with the photos popping on top of the plan, just by clicking a button on the tour. We call this the embedded view, and we hope to add it to this view in the next month or so.
We hope you enjoy these enhancements. As always, this view is available for all active tours.
We are happy to announce that we now can distribute your FloorPlanOnline listings to Zillow, Yahoo Real Estate and other sites powered by Zillow! Zillow and Yahoo have a combined reach of over 10% of Internet users going to real estate websites, so it is a great way for your listing to get seen. While many of you already have your listings distributed to Zillow by your company or MLS, some do not. We therefore have added this as an option in your profile under Edit Linking Profile. Just check the box and we will upload your listing info, and link to the virtual tour, to Zillow/Yahoo.
In addition, your tours can also be distributed to Trulia, another leading real estate portal. When you combine these sites with our existing YouTube video distribution system and Realtor.com, you have most of your bases covered!
Please note, that if you, your company or MLS already distribute the listing to Zillow, our distribution will NOT overwrite that listing. There is a hierarchy and virtual tour companies are at the lower end of the list. Also, the virtual tour link may not come over in other distributed listings…just check with whoever is doing the distribution to ensure the virtual tour link does come with the listing details. We are working on some creative ideas for you get better engage in lead capture from some of these sites too….more to come.
Keep your listing up to date! We do not automatically pull listing data from the MLS….so it is important for you to update the listing status (active, sold, etc) and price in our system. We provide some easy tools to do it – just use the dropdown under Listing Status on the Manage Tours page to change the status. We also display the price right on Manage Tours…and if you need to change it, click Edit Details, then change the price and save.
Other distribution sites coming. We are close to adding Trulia to the list as well, we just need them to do the final approval of our feed to them. We will be adding other sites in the future, such as Frontdoor. We will also be working on a Craiglist posting tool. Do you use Craiglist? We would love to get your opinion on how important Craigslist is to your listing distribution strategy.
New help videos have been added to our help video library. Click here to see our Help Videos. I would like to highlight two videos that are very common customer care issues. We hope the videos will help!
First, how to download and save photos to your computer, for use on your MLS or for your own marketing brochures. Click to see this video. Note, we are very interested in helping make your life easier…we do automated tour linking, and in a few cases, we upload photos, to the local MLS. If you would like us to pursue this with your MLS, we are more than happy to do that, but you first need to contact your MLS and see if they allow it. If not, ask them if they would be willing to work with us to do automated tour linking and photo uploads. If they say “NO,” go higher up the chain…. 
Second, how to customize your tour and flyer colors to match your branding. We suggest using the browsers Firefox or Chrome because both of these have free plugins you can install that will tell you the color code of anything on a web page. Just click the video to see how you can customize the colors to exactly match!
FloorPlanOnline has been producing free YouTube videos for all your FPO tours for quite some time now. You might be thinking to yourself that YouTube is of little value since there aren’t many people going to YouTube to look for their next home. Think again. The real value of having a video of your listing on YouTube is it has tremendous Search Engine Optimization benefits.
FloorPlanOnline YouTube videos get your property (with the branded tour link back to your listing) listed typically on page 1 of search engine returns when you type in the address. And unlike being on Trulia or Zillow, the viewers are directed directly back to you and your tour where you can engage directly in lead capture, not to some page where there might be 3 other agents waiting to take your lead.
If you pay Zillow to enhance your account, you still benefit…but if you do not, there is no way you can get the lead.
Plus, the tour will show up with the YouTube video icon (like at left), and video we know is one thing that attracts users to click. So you have a higher chance of people clicking on your YouTube video listing and ultimately getting back to you, vs a large real estate portal site.
Adding the new voice over tool (just launched this year) to FloorPlanOnline Videos, further adds to the seo power. Google now listens to the voice overs, traslates and indexes the content!
So, if you want the potential to capture the lead yourself and your listing noticed, just add YouTube to your profile. We will automatically upload the video to either your YouTube channel, or ours. If you do not have a YouTube Channel, you can create one, or we have a Get Social service where we create the YouTube Channel and Facebook business page for you, can connect all of your tours into your accounts. Yes, we also have a Facebook app where your featured listings show in your Facebook business page.
All of this is free, so give it a try.
We are pleased to announce several new enhancements to the FloorPlanOnline marketing system:
1. Enhanced iPad Tour Viewer
2. Separate Photo & Video Editing
3. Voice Over | Custom Audio Upload capability
Details for each enhancement are below.
Enhanced iPad Viewer.
We have completely re-written our tour viewer for the iPad which features your tour content in a very clean user interface. Now, you can get a fully functional tour experience, including the video and the interactive floorplan tour on your ipad! Just point and click your way around the floor plan with ease, just like the regular PC experience. It is also optimized for the screen orientation. Hold your iPad in landscape mode, and the content tabs are on top and the content layout is optimized for that view. Rotate the iPad to portrait mode, and the tabs move to the side and content shifts for that orientation as well. We believe it is the most advanced and useful tour viewer for the iPad. Plus, if you have an Apple TV device, you can even play the video on your TV! How cool is that?
Suggestions. In order to make the iPad tour look its best, we suggest you add a marketing description, complete the property details, and add features. We have a details tab that really showcases the property details. We even include the PDF of your flyer and printable floor plans. For older tours, video might not be viewable on your iPad tour due to a different format needed to display the video on the iPad. This can easily be added by just going into your account to the Manage Tour page, then click Edit Tour, then Edit Photos/Video. Hit Save and Close, and your video will get processed by our video server. We have already recreated over 1000 videos for tours going back to the end of October. So if your tour does not have a Video tab on the tour, just go in and edit it, or email us and we can re-queue all of your videos. One other point. There is no RoomPlanner tab on the iPad. This tool is built using flash, and there is a lot of development work to port it over to the iPad….so until that happens (or flash comes to the iPad (likely never)), the RoomPlanner will not be on the iPad version.
This enhancement is included at no additional cost for any active tour, and one reason it took us awhile to implement, so it works on all older tours! Try it – just go to www.111anystreet.com on your iPad. Note…this tour also works on any computer. There are a few tweaks we want to do, but eventually, it can also be your default tour template for the PC as well. Click here to see the PC version on your laptop or desktop.
Separate Photo & Video Editing.
We now have a way for you to separately edit which photos show on the Photo Gallery and WalkThru Video views. It is all done through the same edit page – we just added another check box to show a photo on the Photo View or Video view, or both. When you upload, all photos are added to both by default, but you can adjust what shows by going to the Edit Tour option on the Manage Tours page. With this (and the custom audio tool mentioned below), you can further differentiate the photo and video views.
Suggestions. We highly recommend you keep your video between 1 to 2 minutes in length. Most users will not sit through a 5 minute long video…but if you highlight the best photos taken, add descriptive text, and now, even add a voice over, you can really make your video a multi-media marketing piece that makes you and your listing stand out. And don’t forget, you can easily and automatically add your listing video to either your own custom YouTube channel (or your company’s channel provided you give us the login info) or just upload it to our YouTube channel. It is FREE, and it is a great way to get additional search engine (“SEO”) benefits. For example, once your video has been uploaded and indexed by Google, the listing video typically shows towards the top on page 1 of the search results. Just this little feature can show your seller that you are working hard to sell their home and differentiate it from all of the others.
If you like the Dashboard view on your tour, pick a different photo to start the photo or video view, and now you have 2 different images on the Dashboard view in the 2.0 tour.
Voice Over | Custom Audio Upload.
This is something that has been asked for over the years…and we now have brought it to fruition! You can now upload your own voiceover to the video so you can describe the property in your own way. Google is now indexing video text, so this also helps with the SEO of your tours, and you. Plus, since we upload your video for free to YouTube, it gets better indexed by Google, since they own YouTube. Read more on that here. You can also upload a file with your own music. Just go to Manage Tours, select Edit Tour and then Edit Video. You will see the button to upload the custom audio file. Right now, we ONLY accept MP3 file types. There are lots of free converters online if you have the file in a different type.
A word of caution: While you in theory can upload your own music with a voiceover, the music industry is on a war path about copyright violations. Using music on a virtual tour is for a commercial purpose that requires a license from the copyright holder. All of our music is validly licensed by companies the create or manage the music. Therefore, if you have your own music you want to use, just make sure you have a valid license to use it. Real songs from real artists generally mean big money for a right to use – like thousands of dollars….so if we do find “brand-name artist” music being used, we will be forced to remove the file. They have ways of electronically monitoring websites, and you do not want to have to pay fines or get sued…Neither do we….
Hope you enjoy the enhancements!
Kris Cone
PC HELPER TOOL |
FAQsorders@floorplanonline.com
