Topic #5. Customizing the virtual tour, or Story.
In this post we are going to go through how to edit the overall presentation (the look and feel), the content itself, and some some unique settings and uses of your virtual tour and how to leverage it to get people coming back to your website.
First, let’s look at some Unique Uses of the Story:
1. The default tour theme people see – Select from our Story (4 themes) or the Tour Viewer (top bar). See #2 below for Customizing your tour to pick a theme. You can also do this when you first create a tour order and there is a default setting for this under Profile (top right). As a bonus, you can have a default view, such as the Story, but still use another version, such as use the Tour version to embed on your blog or website. For example.
- Use my.homediary.com/story/184056 as the default tour (my.homediary.com/184056 is the default base URL) that gets linked to the MLS and everywhere else (just use the unbranded version we give you).
- Use my.homediary.com/tour/184056 on your blog and embed it, just like this example. You can see the difference -story or tour in the UR that is highlighted.
Once you have a tour, you can distribute it beyond your MLS, because you have both a branded and unbranded tour link. So leverage the branded version on your own website or blog, and on social media channels. For example, write a blog post talking about your new listing, get a quote from the owner, and then embed the tour into the blog post. See our Spotlight Gallery for what we do on our website. Post the blog link on social media to get people coming back to your site, and seeing you and the cool content you create for marketing listings. You can learn more about embedding the tour into your blog on this post here.
2. Customizing your tour. You can edit most things, including the “hero” section and the order of the content displayed on the tour. See the video below on how quick and easy it is to edit the presentation of your tour, or Story as we like to call it.
3. Customizing your slideshow video. We provide a completely customizable slideshow video that is embedded on your tour, and it can be downloaded and then uploaded to YouTube. You can also use it on your website or social media channels. Here is what you can do with our new video editor:
- Upload video clips to add real movement, an animated logo or a clip of you introducing your new listing
- Add a text explainer slide to communicate a space, complete with emojis, or create a custom call to action slide
- Select different music or transitions for each photo, including the time to display. Music is under the Settings icon.
- Add floor plan images in the sequence, all sync’d to the floor plan database.
- Add any kind of branded content and showcase it in the video or photo gallery. See this post on how to keep it only on the branded version of the virtual tour.
3. Customizing the Floor Plans. We provide a real-time floor plan editor – in fact we are the ONLY virtual tour platform we know of ANYWHERE that has their own floor plan tool that allows you to change anything, instantly. Change the text, hit update tour and new plans get generated, everywhere. So, if you want to add flooring, beds or other furniture to the plan, you can use Edit FloorPlan and customize it and update the look of the tour. It basically acts as a virtual staging tool, similar to what you see below. We can do some of this customization for you with the 3D Enhanced plan upgrades.
Note, we are providing an area report that details the living, nonliving and garage spaces. This is a manual report we create once we produce the tour. If you use the floor plan editor to change the floor plan, such as rename a room, it will not automatically update the area report. See this FAQ on how to update the area report, or just contact us and we can do it.
