As a follow up to Glenn’s Twitter articles, I though I would discuss a Twitter application I stumbled across. TweetLister allows real estate agents to schedule real estate tweets for their property listings which are then published to their Twitter account.
The real estate tweet includes the sale type, suburb, bedrooms, bathrooms, price, 2 property features and a shortened url to view the listing on TweetLister. At TweetLister the user can see the remaining details for the property, including a photo and link to view the listing at the agent’s website. The user can even submit an enquiry through TweetLister which is emailed to the agent.
TweetLister is so easy to use, to sign up you simply enter your Twitter username and password. You then add the details for your listing and schedule when a tweet will be created. Tweets can be created once, daily, weekly or monthly for a particular listing. You control everything through your Control Panel (sidebar on the right in the screenshot), you can cancel listings, view page views and also the number of enquiries submitted for each listing.
To demonstrate the product Business2 kindly created an account and listed a property belonging to one of Agentpoint’s clients. @BusinessTwo on Twitter you can see the published tweet and link to TweetLister for the property listing.
A quick glance around Twitter and you will see only a few agents in Australia are tweeting about new properties they have listed. Personally, I think there is no harm creating a tweet for every new property you list, however I do believe if you re-tweet a listing then you will start to annoy your followers. Saying this, re-tweeting may be appropriate if you have an auction in the coming days and you wanted to remind your followers about it.
One short coming of this software is that it is time consuming as it requires agents to manually enter property details into TweetLister. This creates an opportunity for real estate software companies who can easily develop a similar Twitter application. This application can be integrated into their property listing software, providing agents with real estate listing tweets that are completely automated and effortless.
Alternatively, Domain or REA could develop an application which created Tweets in an agent’s Twitter account for every new property listed by the agent on that portal. The shortened url in the tweet will link back to the real estate portal, increasing the portal’s traffic while providing greater value to agents!
7 Comments
Greg Vincent
Apparently, TweetLister have got some planned upgrades coming to the service in the coming weeks.
They are re-designing it to ensure that the Tweets from TweetLister don’t end up boring your audience & to avoid it having a detrimental affect on agents follower numbers.
It will be interested to see what the next few weeks brings with this application.
Greg Vincent
Providing visitors to share a property they like with all their Twitter followers & facebook friends should be the next step for REA, Domain, etc. (REA already have the ability to share to facebook. )
Digg has just removed it’s shout option & inserted share to Facebook & Twitter because they understand that these 2 sites are at the epicentre of sharing content online.
Maybe the portals could use the tweetmeme plugin as a Twitter share option, like Digg & WordPress use or something similar.
In recent times I’ve noticed more & more agents listings appearing on facebook. It would be interesting to see if this has generated a lot of extra visitors to their site.
Glenn Batten
Re the issue of Tweeting all your listings, or some of your lists.. I think this will depend upon the agent and their listing portfolio. Ray White Surfers Paradise probably does 2000-3000 listings per year. Thats a damn lot of tweets and would soon see me unfollow their account.
In contrast, a suburb with an average sales price of $2m or $3m + is probably only doing a 10 or so listings per month so tweeting everything would probably be fine.
The last thing you want to do is over tweet so people stop following as that would be counter productive. There would be a fine line, but smart company got my chop for over tweeting. Followed them last night but absolutely got hammered this morning so quickly unfollowed.
Speaking from my short personal experience this probably highlights another issue and that is scheduling your tweets. Doing many public tweets in a row is probably going to cause you problems if you do that all the time. And tweeting in the middle of our day will more likely get you clicked through more by your Australian followers but less so by your international followers.
The Insider
Working out the correct level of tweeting is important. On average how many new properties a week would an agent list? If it is less than 3 or 4 then I don’t think creating a tweet for each new listing is too annoying.
But your point Glenn about posting tweets one after the other in a row, is very important. There is nothing worse then seeing your tweet box full of tweets from the same person…..that is like spam!
Sal Espro
I know I’m sounding like a real old wet blanket, folks. But as someone who likes to think he’s followed tech before the average ‘Joe’, I still don’t get the commercial value of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to real estate agents.
Would it be possible for a buyer to sign-up to Tweets from portals that match their particular requirements or would they only be able to sign-up to nominated criteria (which would make it useless for buyers and unwieldy/huge for the portals to manage)?
Thnx for the info, folks.
Sal 🙂
The Insider
Sal Espro, good question.
Signing up for a certain type of tweet through Twitter, is limited to the particular person or company you are following.
However, the beauty of most new web applications like Facebook and Twitter, is that they have an Application Programming Interface (API) which allows any web developer access to use the data within that website to build an external application.
I haven’t viewed the documentation for the Twitter API but more likely than not REA or Domain could build an application which not only creates a property listing tweet in an agent’s Twitter account, but also sends a tweet to a property seeker’s Twitter account who signs up for a particular property alert.
So to answer your question yes it is possible through 3rd party applications built for Twitter.
Peter Ricci
This looks like a great little tool, needs some maturity – but it has great potential.