Twitter Could Be Great for Real Estate - Unless We're NitTwits

I recently posted here about Twitter, and I think that it could be a great tool for real estate professionals. That is, unless we clutter it up with useless information and personal games.

I found a blog that was congratulating certain Twitter Real Estate users for their innovation and great Twitter posts. Here's what I found:

• I looked at six Twitter sites, with about 20 tweets/page on the first page.
• Only about 20%, less than two dozen tweets, had any relationship to real estate topics or markets at all.
• Some talked about percocet, vicodin, getting more followers, updating facebook pages, etc.

New things that get popular quickly are adopted by an early group who tend to sing their praises, and not always about the most important facets. In this case, these real estate professionals are putting items on Twitter that have no value to anyone looking to buy or sell real estate. Some of this is good, with the ability to allow people to get to know you...to a point.

However, when there was not one post out of this 120 that gave any mention of or link to real estate statistics or hard data for these markets, it makes me wonder if the micro-blogging trend will die a quick death from lack of interest from people who might actually become real estate clients. To give credit where it's due, one broker had mostly real estate related Tweets, and I liked that page. However, since his was about a dozen of the 20 or so, that doesn't say a lot for the others.

One of the reasons some gurus say that Twitter is a great tool is that it allows this micro-blogging of breaking news. That's great, unless it's news about how many Coronas you've consumed, or burgers, or your nail appointment, or how to add 100 followers/day to not read the uninteresting stuff you're tweeting. How about a tweet every day with a digest of the previous day's market activity, or current market inventory numbers?