Noelle Nielsen directly addresses camera:    When I started my brokerage less than a year ago, I decided to go all in on video. It fit with our mission statement of Real Estate Done Differently. Since then, we've found that our videos are great agent retention vehicles as well as branding tools.

I'm Noelle Nielsen, broker of Bright Birch Real Estate in Burnsville, Minnesota. Let's take five minutes to talk about my lessons learned building a brokerage video program that encourages agent collaboration.

As a former professional photographer, I wanted an outlet for my creative side. I started taking videos of myself and posting them to Facebook. To my shock, people liked them. But my team is so important to me, so I wanted to bring them into our video strategy.   I hired a full-time videographer and brainstormed with the team on video ideas. We do a lot of parodies. We have one called "The Buyer," which is a parody of “The Bachelor.” We laughed our butts off doing that one.

The beauty of the videos is that the team has a common goal. The agents come in relaxed. We hang out, have fun and create the videos together. This has been a huge part of our success. It helps a lot with the culture and agent retention because the agents become friends through the process.

I've learned some lessons along the way. First, don't go live on video just because you can. Don't hop on Facebook Live and just start talking. I've seen so many people get really uncomfortable because they went straight to live video. Instead, get out your phone and start filming yourself first. Practice doing it until you feel comfortable. 

Next, if you're not somebody who's skilled at filming or is super creative, hire someone. You're willing to spend money on lead generation, right? This is a form of lead generation. Hire a videographer to professionally produce some content for you and come up with creative ideas to market to your sphere. We spend a lot of time scripting and developing ideas for our videos. It is a very involved process. You must be committed to the process in order  to be successful.

After all, you either have to budget your time to learn how to use the equipment or hire someone to do it. At first, I chose to buy the equipment and teach myself to use it. I spent about $5,000 on gear and watched YouTube tutorials. Then, I hired someone to take over the production and I focused on the creative side of it. We create heavily scripted and produced videos that we feature on our YouTube channel.  We put out at least one long video (five to 10 minutes) and a couple of shorter videos each week.

However, if you don't care about doing the professional videos and just want to have an authentic, relatable persona online, you can use Instagram or Facebook Stories and take short video clips showing a day in the life of a Realtor®. But remember, like the tip above, don't do an extended live video until you're practiced. 

Team leaders and brokers should get the entire team involved on both the filming and the creative side of creating your videos. At first, I did the videos alone, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that our company is about more than me; it's about the agents. So, with every single agent that we onboard, we do a video. We'll do an agent spotlight and I will sit them down and ask them questions that showcase their personality and expertise. Every single agent has something interesting to say about a past career, hobby or about themselves. 

Finally, I learned that a solid video program must extend out to social media and other collaborative projects. We have an active Facebook page and I encourage all of our agents to do social media together. That means engaging with each other's posts and getting to know each other on a personal level.

Even though we're not a team brokerage, it has that feel because we are all rooting for each other. Video helps us reinforce our collaborative culture as well as branding us as unique and cohesive with our motto which is Real Estate Done Differently.