Twitter has risen in the last year from a novel, if distracting and misunderstood online oddity, into a full-fledged social networking technology. And regardless of your own opinion, the Twitter phenomenon is leaving it’s mark as a viable medium for online communication. For real estate agents and marketing professionals in general, understanding how to twitter and tweet might eventually bring in that next big sales close, so it’s important to understand why twitter works.
Twitter users come in all shapes and sizes, and its foundation is based on smaller social networks, friends, people that communicate via text message as well as those that might read a website or blog. So twitter starts out as a more highly interactive medium that has more audience buy-in. It can reach a friend via cell phone while they are on a subway car commuting to work, but it can also reach a mass audience, as evidenced by website reporters giving up to date 2008 Olympics coverage via twitter feeds. From the constant contact of a small group of friends, to a informative daily PR arm of a major online content provider or business entity, twitter connects people and broadcasts immediate headline news.
A quick look at twitter’s predecessor, the blog:
Blogging brings all the advantages of content discovery on the web, but you have to go out and get that audience and usually start the blog basically talking to yourself. Twitter on the other hand, you start pushing info to your friends and group right away. Real-time access to a well-defined audience. Taking the text message one step further, with the ability to tell everybody in your community a general current update of a time-sensitive state you’re in that might be of interest. This is a much more immediate response than what is possible with RSS subscribers, and with the melding of online technology with cell phones, tweeting becomes even more apparently powerful.
Now, there are a lot of people using twitter to post a comment like "Feeling sleepy", but for real estate agents, this form of immediate communication could easily be "just found/or newly closed listing, and click here to see more about it". And more than just small talk, it’s an effective way to sculpt and market the day-to-day aspects of your life as a Realtor that might be of interest to those that your built your online circle around.
Example twitter topics for real estate agents:
- listings and Open houses
- tweet recent blog posts, or any other online publication
- tweet any time-sensitive promotions you are offering
- sky is the limit!!!
Developing relationships is the key to real estate agent success, and this is also the key to Twitter. Hmm, maybe we should start taking a closer look?….