There's no denying that Twitter has taken hold, and as an online user if you still don't know what it is, you must be spending considerable time under a cyber rock. From a real estate perspective, Twitter has several uses. As with any Twitter account, the more followers you have, the greater your potential sphere of influence, and the more chance you have of someone actually contacting you in regards to whatever you may be offering – in the case of Century 21 agents, real estate assistance of course.
Twitter has recognised the value in this, and has introduced an application allowing real estate agents to schedule real estate tweets for their property listings. These tweets are then published to their Twitter account.
The real estate tweet includes the sale type, suburb, bedrooms, bathrooms, price, and two property features of the listing. There is also a shortened url to view the listing on TweetLister. Once on TweetLister, the user can see the additional property details, including a photo and link to view the listing at the agent's website. The user can even submit an enquiry through TweetLister which is emailed to the agent.
To use TweetLister an agent just needs enter their existing Twitter username and password (I suggest you sign up if you haven't already!), then add the details for listings and schedule when a tweet will be created. Tweets can be created once, daily, weekly or monthly for a particular listing. Everything is able to be controlled through the Control Panel and agents have the ability to cancel listings, view page views and also view the number of enquiries submitted for each listing.
If you take a quick look around Twitter, you'll see that there are only a handful of real estate agents in Australia tweeting about new properties they have listed. In fact, there are only a handful of agents tweeting about anything! Now is the time to make your mark, and let your customers know how dedicated you are to providing them regular, updated information. Twitter is a great way to make regular contact with people who have actively shown an interest in you and what you do, so there is little harm in creating a tweet for every new property you list. As with all e-communications however you need to be mindful of what your followers have actually opted in for, and what's going to annoy them in a hurry. Don't be tempted to retweet properties if you don't get the initial response you were hoping for, but it may be appropriate to resend as a reminder in the lead up to an auction. Common sense should prevail, a concept not unique to the online space!