“Before making purchases, people turn to video reviews for the information they need. In fact, in the past two years on YouTube, videos with “review” in the title had more than 50,000 years’ worth of watch time on mobile alone.”

By Steve Moran

I am subscribed to the “Think With Google” Digital Tips email list and, at least once a month, they publish something that makes me go: “Yes! Yes! Yes! This is perfect for senior living.”

Video Reviews

Today I came across this on Video Reviews:

“Before making purchases, people turn to video reviews for the information they need. In fact, in the past two years on YouTube, videos with “review” in the title had more than 50,000 years’ worth of watch time on mobile alone.”

Senior Housing Forum Partner Caring.com has compelling data that senior living communities with consumer reviews get more leads and more move-in’s than those without.

While video reviews are similar to testimonials, they are not the same and, at least feel, a lot more genuine and reliable.

Here is an example that is for a Bluetooth dongle. It was posted a year ago and has more than half a million views. It is 10 minutes long so I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND watching the whole thing . . . unless you are in the market for a Bluetooth dongle.

Crazy, right? Bluetooth dongle 500,000+ views. If you are in the market, at the end of the video you will have a pretty good idea of what this one is like.

More From Google

There are a whole bunch of types of videos. Here are some of those types:

  • Unboxing — Like the video above, these were the first reviews and are the most prevalent.

  • “What’s in my bag?” — This is where a shopper will review what they already bought, what they like about it, and how they decided to buy it.

  • Shop With Me — This is a variation on what’s in my bag, but you actually get to go along with the video maker on a shopping experience.   

“In the past two years, watch time of these videos has grown over 10X on mobile alone.”

Senior Living

There is a business opportunity here for someone. In fact, if you are a struggling video provider and would like to work with me on creating a new thing. Let me know. This could be a huge business opportunity from the vendor side and on the senior living side.

Imagine These Two Scenarios . . . 

  1. A self proclaimed expert . . . like Steve Moran . . . does a video review. Like this: 

    “Today I am going to take you on a senior living shopping experience. This is very real to me because recently I had to do this for my mom.”  

    I then walk through the journey of how I might find your community on the web, what it was like to call for information, what it was like to tour the community and then what I liked and what I didn’t like so much.

  1. Find the family member and or a resident and actually walk them through the buying process on camera. Ask questions like:

    1. How did you decide you needed senior living?

    2. How did you find this community?

    3. What other communities did you look at?

    4. How did you first connect with the community and how did that go?

This would need to be done by someone other than an employee of the community but it could be done by someone the community or the senior living organization contracts with.   

Now take that video, you would only likely need one . . . and post it on your website. It will give you more credibility than you can possibly imagine.

The Hard Stuff

There are three moments of courage you need to think about:

  1. The video will be of funky quality, like the dongle video above.

  2. The dialog on the video will by necessity have some things about what they did not like on the journey: you will hate that but it will give the story tremendous credibility.

  3. You may find that in making the video the journey story was so bad, you can’t use it because you have things that need fixing. This is hard, this is frustrating but it will make you better.

What do you think?