Staying in Touch with Twitter-
What's All the Buzz About?
One of the most important rules for success in the real estate market is maintaining effective
communication. As a real estate professional, it means finding the most useful tools that can help
you communicate more effectively and help generate leads and sales. It also means keeping a
watch on activity in the industry along with national, regional or neighborhood trends, and then
being able to react to those trends.
In past articles, we've talked about using the Internet to reach out to potential clients by creating
your own real estate Web log, or, as they're commonly known, blogs. Your real estate blog can
allow you to reach out to a wider customer base, position you as an expert in your market and
establish a relationship with potential clients long before you ever show a property in person. Now,
there's a new tool that's gaining popularity among real estate professionals called Twitter.
So what is Twitter? It's a free, Internet-based micro-blogging social network service that was
created in 2006 by the San Francisco-based company Obvious. Twitter is a type of instant
messaging application that allows you to send a near real-time text message to many people at the
same time. So what does all that mean, and what can it do for you? Let's break it down piece-bypiece.
Social Networking and Media
First, social networking on the Internet has been available for a number of years in a variety of
forms - all allowing the user to connect and network with hundreds or even thousands of people
from all around the world. The two largest and most well-known Web-based networks are MySpace
and Facebook. You can post profiles, blogs, photographs, drawings, music files and videos on these
networks, creating an interactive dialogue with any number of others that may share your
interests.
Another popular social networking service is Instant Messaging, or IM. The attraction of IM is that it
allows almost real-time text-based conversation, or chat, between two or more users over a
network. It differs from email because IM chat happens immediately in front of the user, and can
include a number of different participants.
All of the social networking options on the Web can be useful to real estate professionals as sales,
organizational and communications tools. However, one of the limitations of those networks is that
the target of your message must have a computer or an Internet-ready mobile device in order to
view your messaging.
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