In a shifting real estate market, the guidance and expertise that Inman imparts are never more valuable. Whether at our events, or with our daily news coverage and how-to journalism, we’re here to help you build your business, adopt the right tools — and make money. Join us in person in Las Vegas at Connect, and utilize your Select subscription for all the information you need to make the right decisions. When the waters get choppy, trust Inman to help you navigate.
Are you receiving Inman’s Agent Edge? Make sure you’re subscribed for the latest on real estate technology from Inman’s expert Craig Rowe.
BigVu is a video creation and marketing solution.
Platforms: Browser; iOS and Android apps
Ideal for: Independent brokerages, teams, marketing managers, admins
Top selling points:
- Innovative editing features
- Video landing pages
- Teleprompter capability
- Collections feature
- Mobile-browser app interaction
Top concern:
This is more a video content platform than a quick, on-the-go video creation tool. Agents wanting spontaneous mobile tech for social media may not love BigVu. However, brokerages and teams with savvy marketing admins, and brand-conscious agents would be wise to read further.
What you should know
BigVu is a video creation and editing suite with a number of standout features and a proven track record of success. This isn’t technology birthed from the covid era’s need for digital listing content. Instead, it’s a well-developed, clever and multi-faceted video content management solution that would make a very cool addition to the tech stack of high-producing teams and brand-forward indy brokerages.
With direct-to-social video posting, deep content analytics and a number of tools to make videos easy to produce and edit, BigVu could have a significant role in any real estate business looking to commit to video. The interface, editing tools and flexibility offer a range of user levels, a low learning curve, and the expert marketer a few new tricks to add to their outreach mix.
For starters, the teleprompter tool is quite slick, enabling clear, simple text input and a number of settings for easy, slow reading as your native phone or desktop camera captures the visual. We know how popular sales scripts are for cold calling and other lead-gen efforts, so it should come as no surprise that according to BigVu’s research, 75 percent of real estate agents prefer writing down a script before recording a video.
Most will prefer to use the Teleprompter on a mobile device, in which case it smoothly scrolls over the screen as you talk, both in vertical or horizontal video formats. Once captured and complete, the video will be available on the desktop app in moments, which should provide more a conducive space for editing and launching marketing efforts.
In terms of editing, BigVu does a lot to make this super easy. Any imported video can have its audio track automatically converted into captions, which will overlay each snippet of video in which they appear. Thus, the software easily pulls apart the video according to audio segments.
Captioned clips can be quickly shared to Meta networks, and for editing longer clips, users need only highlight the word on which they want the video to begin or end. It’s one of the more unique takes on simple editing I’ve seen, and I find it really clever.
Videos can also be published on a branded landing page, design selections and templates for which are found under the Pages menu. These pages are ideal for use as a way to consolidate listings, categorize homes in a specific neighborhood or to catalog takes on a local community.
New videos can be created directly to each page, as well as assigned a page after publishing.
The projects dashboard offers a summary view into existing videos and those in various stages of development, while Collections give users what BigVu calls, “an evolved version of landing pages.”
Collections are video carousels with the ability to carry unique bits of additional text and interactive content. The best comparison is Instagram’s Stories experience. Users will need to pay an additional fee to access the Collections feature.
I was surprised, in a good way, to see the extent BigVu goes to help users leverage their social media networks. As opposed to simply linking accounts and publishing from the creation module, Social Channels functions much more like a social media scheduling solution, such as HootSuite or Sprout Social. It includes LinkedIn and TikTok, as well as engagement tracking and performance charting.
There’s a large library of stock footage and imagery that can be added to video projects, and sending a project to the Sequence module enables the user to dive into more precise editing.
There’s more for BigVu users to discover as they dig through the experience, but know that any team or dedicated marketing expert will find most of what they need within a few hours of use. This is the type of tool that can serve as primary component of any marketing stack, and serve the needs of multiple user groups and creative professionals.
It’s fun, boasts some innovative features and has plenty of reason to earn significant traction in the industry.
Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe
Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.
