by Kris Cone | May 9, 2013 | Help & FAQ, Listing Tools, Technology
Add all of your videos to your YouTube Channel…quickly & easily
Due to some changes made by Google, who owns YouTube, you now have to authenticate your YouTube account with FloorPlanOnline in order for us to automatically upload your Tour video files into your own YouTube channel. If you are just uploading to our YouTube channel, you can ignore the rest of this news post.
Why the Change? Originally, you logged into YouTube with a user name and password you created when you signed up for YouTube. Google has now completely integrated YouTube with the rest of the Google services, and they have eliminated the separate YouTube user name. It is now your Google login. Because the Google login also provides access to your email and other Google services, Google has implemented a “Facebook-like” authentication process for 3rd party websites, like FloorPlanOnline. All you need to do is allow access, which is the virtual handshake between our two sites, and the account is authenticated.
A few steps to do this.
1. You need to be logged into Google – either YouTube, your Google+ or your Gmail account. Do this in the same browser you are using to access FloorPlanOnline.
2. In your FloorPlanOnline account, go to Edit Profile and then click the Edit Tour Linking & Distribution button.
3. Under the Automated Website Distribution Service section, check the box to link toMy YouTube Channel. Once you check the box, a new window will pop from Google asking you to allow access. Click the blue button.
4. If you want the change to apply to all of your videos, just select the Yes option.
5. Go to the bottom and save.
That is it. Each time you create a video and Approve/Publish it, we will upload the video to your YouTube channel. Note, videos do get queued up in our video server, so there can be a delay of up to several hours depending on the time of day. If you mark the status of the listing as sold or off market, the video is automatically removed from YouTube. If you want to manually manage this, then just download the video under the Marketing Center (the Photos & Marketing Tools link under Manage Tours), and you can upload to YouTube manually.
Note either way, you can do some edits of the video, like add call outs, once it is on YouTube. If you want to show this YouTube video back on your tour, you can do that too….just use the YouTube embed code and paste it into the custom video section on your tour (not applicable to the 1.0 tour).
Enjoy!
by Kris Cone | Mar 6, 2013 | Listing Tools, Tour Updates
I am really excited to announce some cool updates to the Single Property Website Tour. Click here to see a sample tour.
Updates include:
- Centering of the tour on any web page (it used to be left justified)
- Better fitting of the content to eliminate scrolling of the main content area
- Cool wrap around styling of the content section headers
- Ability to change the overall background color…so now you have two colors to showcase your brand and enhance the look of the tour. It makes the content really pop!
- Ability to upload a background image – this could be the image of the property, a view of the area, or a custom branding image featuring your logo. For now, the custom background image only shows on the branded tour.
You can make these changes on a tour by tour basis, or in your profile to have them apply to all future tours.
A little tip. If you use Google’s Chrome browser, you can install a free “color picker” tool that allows you to get the color code for any color on any web page. Click here for a list of programs you can install for free to get the color code. Once you have the code, go to Edit Details on the Manage Tours page for a tour, or Edit Profile, and put the color either in the background 1 or background 2 spot. You can also do this for text. For example, this green is the color code #878f55
It is really simple to do and is another way you can really showcase your brand. The next training session will go over some advanced tour customization tricks. Click here to register…it is FREE!
We would love to hear feedback….please comment or post something in our support forum.
by Kris Cone | Feb 18, 2013 | Listing Tools, Tour Updates, What's New
Thanks to one of our providers in the LA area, you can see a great example of the Video Clips & Voic eover capability. Just click here to view the tour video and see how well an intro & exit video, video clips and a voice over works to really help sell this property.
by Kris Cone | Jan 11, 2013 | Help & FAQ, What's New
It appears that due to recent changes to how Google and YouTube account access works, IF you have set up 2-step verification in your Google account (meaning you no longer login to YouTube with a separate YouTube user name, but you use your Google account user name, which is likely your Google email) you will not be able to post videos to your own YouTube channel until you create an application specific password in your Google account. Please check Google help for how to do this. Thanks a lot Google for making our lives safer!
To learn more go to https://www.google.com/settings/security and then select Manage Access and create an application specific password, and then copy and paste that password, along with your login name, in our profile page for linking.
by Kris Cone | Jan 9, 2013 | Listing Tools
Our interactive floorplan tools are great for residential properties, but they are also cool tools to market or manage commercial spaces, such as a floor, a building or a whole complex. An example of how you can use the RoomPlanner tool to plan and manage your office space is below.
As part of our tools, you can generate 2D and 3D floor plans on demand, just like the example below. Go back and edit at any time…all edits are included in the one time price!
by Kris Cone | Jan 4, 2013 | Listing Tools
We recently added a check tool for the MLS or Listing number associated with your tour. As you create a tour, there is an option to select whether the MLS is Valid, Not Needed or Is Going to change. If you select it is valid, when you approve and publish the tour, we will link it to the websites desired, such as Realtor.com, the MLS (if applicable), Zillow (Yahoo), Trulia and Seetheproperty.com (our own search website). If you mark the MLS as Going to Change, we will not link the tour anywhere.
On the Manage Tours page, there will be a red Update Required! text if the system thinks the MLS is not valid. Just click edit details next to this text to update the listing with the correct information and save at the bottom. The notification should then go away.
This was put into place because some people were confused as to when a tour was published and linked for various websites. We hope this eliminates the confusion and the cases of unwanted distribution.
