Twitter Real Estate Agent's New Best Friend

Everyone is on Twitter now days. Companies are using Twitter to connect with their customers, grandparents are tweeting to see what their grandkids are up to, and as a real estate agent you are sitting on a wealth of information that can take your business to the next level.

If you are not familiar with Twitter I would recommend a great video put out by Common Craft explaining Twitter, http://www.commoncraft.com/twitter. Essentially Twitter is a microblogging service, that allows you to tell people what you are doing in 140 characters or less. You can post updates through the Twitter website, on a mobile device through texting, or a slew of third party applications that make tweeting easier.

First thing you want to do is a get a Twitter account and start following your past clients, friends, colleges, and asking them to follow you back. Update your Twitter with relevant and interesting news that you know your audience will find useful. Also don't over tweet as you'll quickly loose followers, a good rule of thumb is to not tweet more than 5 times a day. tweet so that your users will be excited to get your tweet a good example is Tony Hsieh the CEO of Zappos (@zappos). Even though he is the CEO of an online retail store, Tony tweets famous quotes, new product releases, and funny life moments like this one, "At hotel, wondering why there are chirping crickets in my room. They are probably wondering why there's a human in their room" or my all time favorite, “Wanted to try to spend time this weekend being more cultured, so I changed my car's GPS settings to talk in an Australian accent”

Get familiar with Twitter search. Put the city of the area that you serve, you'll be able to find insider information about what is going on around town. Also in the advance search you can refine the search to only find tweets from users in a specific area. This becomes really useful if you are looking for potential clients. For example I refined my search to a 50 mile radius in Seattle and searched for "real estate agent" and found this tweet from a users, "Man, I'm feeling so good this weekend. Fired my real estate agent and am slowing down on the home-buying process. Such a relief!" What a great opportunity to reach out and find out what happened with his past agent and see if I could offer my service. Play around with key terms and think about what users might be talking about when it comes to buying and selling homes.

If you have a blog you can also automatically tweet your users when you have a new blog. Services such as Tweetbots (http://tweetbots.com/) allow you to pull in your RSS feed and have the title of your blog tweeted to all of your followers, notifying them to come check out the new post. Also be sure to install the retweet button from http://tweetmeme.com which allows your blog users to easily retweet your blog content.

I am curious to hear other ways that agents have embraced Twitter and hear any success stories.

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