But, as mentioned in this New York Times technology post, Twitter's growth has created a "firehose" of information, and the trick now becomes how to get your trickle of information out of that huge stream without drowning. When "Lists" came along, this seemed like a way for a list of users related by common subject matter or interests to be grouped and subscribed to for updates more focused on your desired information goals. But, now you could be subscribing to a list with hundreds of members, and get thousands of daily tweets, many of no interest or value...even if you could scan them all.
As a real estate professional, what are your information requirements? What would be of value to you on a daily basis in the way of tweets that could help you to build more business, network a bit, and serve your clients better? Of course, there's also keeping up with your competition as well. If you set out a list of those information needs, you'll see that you're creating a list of keywords and phrases, much like you'd use to search in Google or Bing. Well, they work in Twitter as well, and you're getting up-to-the-minute results. Of course, you can go in on a regular basis and do individual searches, but that's not efficient. Or, you can get an RSS feed for a Twitter search and bring it into your feed reader. However, my reader is pretty full now, a daunting site first thing in the morning. I don't want to make it so scary I will stop looking.
One excellent way to get a handle on this huge stream of information is to hone your key phrases over time to be very specific to the precise information you want. In other words, you can use various "AND" and "OR" type of combinations, and even rule out certain words, all in the same search. So, you could end up with a search to keep you updated on new Web prospecting methods by searching on "Internet prospecting" AND "real estate," but rule out words that bring too much spammy content, possibly "profits." There are a great many out there tweeting about "huge profits" in real estate with the Internet. Or, "prospecting on the Internet for huge real estate profits." I'd be more interested in not getting the "profit" posts, but would still love to get a tweet linking me to a new approach to Internet prospecting for real estate buyers in my area.
OK, so now we have a dozen or so phrases that should keep us informed about breaking news or trends that could help us to stay updated on the best and latest real estate business practices. But, we don't want them in our feed reader, and we need a way to efficiently bring that information to us in a way that allows quick scanning to see what merits more in-depth reading. Enter Hootsuite, a free online application that can bring it all to one place for you, yet keep the information in highly organized tabbed columns for fast reference.
You could use one of those columns to subscribe to a list I guess, but I use them exclusively for key phrase searches, and a few very focused groups of less than a dozen or so people I usually really want to follow closely. Consider each of these columns a small sip or stream from the huge Twitter firehose, with just those tweets that mention precisely the words or phrases you consider of interest or value to your business.
