Those who have been around a while in real estate have learned that marketing, especially in traditional print and broadcast media, can be expensive. They struggle with interpreting the charts and graphs showing demographics of audience and try to determine where to spend the hard-earned marketing dollar. All of this effort is focused on targeting advertising to reach the most likely customer prospects. Scattered approaches waste money, and too many people ignore the ads that cost so much.
Yes, Twitter is free, but that doesn't mean a marketer can be wasteful in their approach. Targeting those who are most likely to do business is still the goal. And, real estate professionals are slowly realizing that having thousands of followers doesn't mean that their tweets will actually be read, much less clicked on, resulting in a live prospect. When a tweet announcing a price drop in a desirable property is lost in a huge stream of personal and general area tweets, it's likely to pass by totally unnoticed by a prospect who may have an interest. In fact, if that prospect is following the real estate professional's tweets, they must have some interest in local real estate. But, if they miss that price alert because it's flowing by with family and holiday wishes tweets, it hasn't done its job. So, adopting a multiple account approach can focus the purpose of the tweet, presenting it to those with the most and most immediate interest.
The personal twitter account - where the world can get the personal approach, hobbies, interests, local events, etc. Some people will want to follow this account to get to know the agent before an actual contact.
New MLS listings account - not just the new listings of the single agent, but all new listings as they come on the MLS can be sent out as tweets. Any prospect following this type of account will probably have some short term interest.
Price drop alert account - now the focus gets even tighter, as the follower can watch for value associated with price reductions. Though this account can be combined with the new listing account, they do have two different purposes.
Real estate statistics account - or call it market announcements. Trends, absorption rates, current inventory fluctuations, etc. can all be announced in tweets here. Some people are really analytical and love to "crunch the numbers."
These are examples of how to narrow the focus of a Twitter account to meet the needs of people already inundated with information. Anyone with a true interest in buying or selling property in the area, and a Twitter user, will find one or more of these accounts very handy to follow. The goal isn't to build a huge follower base of people with little or no interest in the majority of the tweets. It's to feed useful information to a targeted follower group with immediate interest in real estate in the area. One more tactic that can help to make sure the tweet is noticed is to have a unique account image that grabs the attention. It will appear beside all of the tweets from that account, and the follower will be able to recognize them quickly. How much would this targeting cost in the newspaper or broadcast media? Actually, it doesn't matter, as it couldn't be done there.
So, how difficult is it going to be to manage multiple Twitter accounts, getting the right type of tweets to the right place? It's a snap with Hootsuite. In a blogging setup, it's a great tool. After doing a new post that fits into one of these Twitter real estate accounts, there is a button that will bring up Hootsuite and let the user select one or more accounts to send it to. Ten seconds, and it's done. Create highly targeted information streams for highly interested prospects.
