Twitter promotes itself as a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
However, ingenious people are finding a mass of different uses for Twitter. We are even building this into our new property platform Zoo Property, so that agents can automatically notify followers of new listings, price changes etc.
I am sure other platforms will do similar things and that’s the beauty of technology, there are a million uses for even what at first seems like a pointless tool and sometimes the company that makes these tools, do not even know what they will be uses for.
Even Google Maps did not even think about what people may do with mashing up the data and now there are millions of websites using mapping in so many unique ways.
Here is an other excellent Ted Talk from Evan Williams
7 Comments
David Ross
While the potential of sites like twitter to the local real estate industry is still unclear due to the limited penetration it currently has, it seems obvious from its uptake in the US that it is significant.
A broader marketing strategy that extends beyond traditional web (and print of course) avenues is a key ingredient to the next evolution of real estate businesses.
Generating market-relevant, good quality content as part of a social web media strategy will provide these agents with another level of brand and profile awareness that can only be good for business.
This may take some time (and educating) given that most agents don’t equate facebook or YouTube as a genuine marketing tool, let alone twitter.
We will see (and educate).
Greg Vincent
Dave, I’ve been looking into Twitter to see how it can be best applied by real estate agents.
The best thing about Twitter is that you can see conversations online & decide whether to simply listen in or interact. But like with all social networking don’t just jump in there & sell.
Also, don’t just keep sending your followers to your company website all the time. They will quickly unfollow you. Provide interesting tweets & link to helpful sites.
There’s are a few different Twitter terminologies to understand like RT=Retweet. @ replies is when you want to send a message that anyone can view & DM is sending a Direct Message ( just like emailing them ).
1. Twitter is fantastic for sending traffic to your website & blog posts. As an agent I would be Twittering about any new blog posts you’ve written, real estate videos, any new listings, any price changes, open home times & when you’ve sold a property.
2.Because each Tweet is only 140 characters or less, you can send people across to your website by using http://www.TinyURL.com to shorten the web link.
3.To leverage your social networking you can also use the Twitter App within Facebook to have your Tweets upgrade your Facebook status.
4.Use TwitterSearch to search by keyword, topic, location, username, etc. You can search to see Tweets regarding real estate, buying a home, selling a property, etc.
5. Even better still is a Twitter App called http://www.nearbytweets.com/. This enables people to search localised content. Could become a helpful application for real estate agents.
There are lots of other great things that are possible on Twitter like being able to brand your Twitter page to your real estate company & applications like TweetDeck also make life a lot easier & lots more.
But, if there’s one important recommendation I must make. When setting up your Twitter account be careful to use your own name or an abbreviation of it, not your real estate company name.
There are 2 main reasons for this: 1. Your company may change it’s name in the future & you will lose all your followers. 2. Over the internet you need to be as human as possible. Remember, people like to buy from people.
PS: one last thing. Don’t say anything on Twitter that you wouldn’t like to see appearing on the news or A Current Affair. Twitter works faster than the news.
Robert Simeon
Quite amazing watching these new online businesses evolve on the www. Obvioulsy some disappear as quickly as they emerge just that Twitter offers many unique points of differences namely – added traffic to blogs and at the end of the day it is all about increasing traffic.
I have no doubt that blogs will play a very large part in the future for the real estate industry – and Twitter is something that we will closely look further into.
Just as interesting is that real estate agents claim that blogs take up to much time – I guess they don’t realise that in many cases time is against them already.
Intresting thoughts Peter, David and Greg. One can’t argue that Twitter is not cost effective.
Greg Vincent
Robert & Peter,
Once you get your teeth into Twitter you’ll find it so beneficial to what you have already created.
You can use TweetLater to set up a sequence of ongoing tweets that link people back to your recent posts & even any of your old blog posts.
You could have people on Twitter retweeting your posts to their audience of followers.
To give you an idea of how this works I did this tweet the other day…
approx. 1000 tweets about #Earthquake in #Melbourne before Melbourne Age posted article… http://tinyurl.com/cdngwq
Within minutes this tweet was retweeted by a lady who has over 24,000 followers.
I inserted the # tags in the tweet because the Melbourne Earthquake was a trending topic on Twitter at that time. This meant that it also got exposure to all the people following Twitter Trends.
Now this tweet didn’t create visitors back to my website, but I got a large number of followers from this one tweet.
Once you have followers they will then see all of your tweets & you’ll be able to send the followers back & forth to your blog posts time & time again.
Imagine what you could do with tweets linking back to the pages on your blogs, especially if you set up an automated sequence of tweets via Tweet Later.
Robert Simeon
Greg,
I agree it would be a most interesting Test Case to see exactly what the traffic spike would be. I don’t believe (at this juncture) I have seen any agency websites in Australia that have attempted this yet – I believe it will only be a matter of time.
Twitter is not a good advertisement for print and I am watching with interest to see how many Twitters in Australia jump on board.
Cheers
Greg Vincent
Robert,
It may be worth checking out http://search.twitter.com/ for any trending topics that may be relevant to your weekly blog articles. Then you simply post a few tweets with the trend #tag (Hash-Tag) to group your tweet & link to your blog post into the trend.
Just a thought. 🙂
Note: For anyone thinking that they should just throw any old link into there to spam the trend, the idea of Twitter is to build a following & they’ll run a mile if you spam trending topics. Always make your links related to what you’re tweeting about.