Here's what Twitter is all about. You get your free account, and in 140 characters or less, you post up about what you're doing right now. At least that's how Twitter got started. Of course, there isn't a lot of value to most of us in knowing what our friends and acquaintances are eating for breakfast this morning.
What Twitter has evolved into is a business tool that lets companies communicate with their customers on a realtime basis. Huge companies are maintaining Twitter presences to monitor comments about them on the Web. After all, people talk, and now they're doing it on Twitter. Did you know that you can go to Twitter Search and do a search on your name or that of your company with a smiley face :) behind it and get Tweets (that's what they call Twitter posts) that have positive words about you or your company? The same holds true for the bad side with a :(.
So, what does this rapidly growing social networking medium offer to the real estate professional? Well, I'm putting price drop alerts, value property alerts, hotsheet reports and more out as tweets. But, there are still a lot of people not into Twitter, so how do I get to them as well? I have created a page on my site that feeds in the RSS feed of my Twitter account, placing a link on my site to "Real Estate Alerts."
Because there are great third party tools to post a Web page link straight to my Twitter account in a couple of clicks, I have my MLS report page for a price alert up on the screen several times a day, sending it to Twitter as an alert with one click. But, I then bring it back to my site with the RSS feed, but don't have to do anything to make that happen, because the RSS feed is automatically displayed with the latest tweet on top. The world of real estate marketing has turned upside down. Don't be the last to know.
