Real Estate Marketing Twitter

A while back I wrote a real estate marketing twitter post on my Active Rain blog titled: 4 Must Have Tools to Automate Twitter. I’ve had several comments on it, which tells me that Real Estate Agents are seeing all the buzz about Twitter and are looking for ways to make it work for them.

A couple of days ago a new Twitter application made its debut and I thought it looked promising enough to write a review. The new app is called TweetLister. Think of it as TweetLater for Real Estate.

What is TweetLister?

TweetLister is a free service that allows real estate brokers and owners to take full advantage of the vast, wide-reaching social network on Twitter.com. With TweetLister, you can easily create, post and manage all of your Twitter listings. You can track clicks on your listings, and collect leads – all in one spot. It’s easy. It’s friendly. And (did we mention?) it’s free.

How TweetLister delivers on its promises

After putting TweetLister through it’s paces and creating a couple of listings, I don’t see any reason why anyone involved in real estate marketing, should wait to try TweetLister. It’s so easy that you don’t even have to create a new account. Just use enter your existing Twitter login credentials and you will be Tweeting Listings in a flash.

The interface is simple. The form that you fill out to create a listing automatically creates a tweet that will stay within the 140 character limit imposed by Twitter. Most of the fields are combo boxes or pull-down menus which minimizes the amount of typing that you have to do. That was smart on the part of the developers, because even though it’s easy, who wants to enter the listing data into yet another form? At least you only have to do it once per listing. We’re coming up on the really good part.

With all the data filled in you now get to set the schedule for the ad / Tweet / Listing. You can have it post right away or for some time in the future. The really useful thing is that you can schedule recurring Tweets on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. You also have the option to specify a period of time that the schedule will run, say the duration of the listing contract.

Managing Your TweetLister Listings

Once you’ve created a few listings you can monitor their performance.

TweetLister creates a link in the Tweet that will lead back to the listing detail on TweetLister. At first I was disappointed in this, hoping instead that the link would lead back to my url of choice, but Twitter links are “no-follow” links which means Google shouldn’t be giving out “link juice” for them anyway.

Two goods things about the TweetLister listing detail page is that it provides a contact form so that anyone interested in the property can contact you. The listing detail also provides the more information url that you entered, so that the visitor can link through to your site. This link is a “follow” link which means your site will get Google credit for a back-link. This will be more important as TweetLister’s PageRank starts to climb in Google as I’m sure it will.

TweetLister lets you track the number of visits, contacts and days online as well as allowing you to change the status of the property for instance from Active to Sold.

So you won’t manage all of your property marketing efforts from TweetLister, but it will definately let you get your arms around your Twitter activity.

Other Thoughts and Recommendations

At the top-left of TweetLister you’ll see a link named “search listings”. This is a very handy tool for searching Twitter for real estate Tweets based on a number of criteria that you can specify. I think this would be a handy stand-alone app for home and property buyers.

When using TweetLister, I would caution against posting your listings too frequently. Remember that Twitter and other social networking tools are meant to be social. If you set your schedule to post ten listings daily you will annoy your followers quickly. Posting weekly is probably ok, but spread out the listings over the week and even have them post at different times of the day.

I heard a statistic this week that 60% (or more) of new Twitter accounts are abandoned. This indicates that the usefulness of Twitter is not readily apparent. I would agree with that. If you are one of those 60%, here’s how you can create a very useful Twitter stream that home seekers will be glad to follow:

1. Load up TweetLister with all your listings and set them to post at a frequency you are comfortable with.
2. Post a Tweet at least once a day or every other day with great tips about buying homes in your area or other items of news that would be of interest to someone looking for property.

That’s it! Within a couple of weeks your Twitter stream will look like an ol’ pro.

Conclusion

Start using TweetLister today. Especially if you are an agent who is using Twitter already. If you’re not using Twitter yet or you just started, this tool is perfect to help you get your feet wet.

If you found this article useful, please leave a comment and let me know. And don’t forget to Follow Me on Twitter. Thanks!

Brett