Recently I’ve been following a thread on realestateforum.com about “Social Networking” which has raised some worthwhile comments. As you’d expect, the conversation has eventually turned to the topic of Twitter. The latest post today was basically commenting on how many real estate agents are now starting to use Twitter to ‘blast’ listing details repeatedly (as much as 20 times a day). I thought my reply was worth re-posting here for you to see,…

It never ceases to amaze me how supposedly intelligent sales professionals can’t figure out that ‘message blasting’ and adding URL’s to every Tweet is just going to lose you massive credibilty. It becomes very clear to your ‘followers’ that you’re not really interested in social networking at all,.. just getting more sales!

The problem with most web2.0 strategies is that they’re free and so they get abused as does email. If agents had to pay a premium for them then we’d see some creativity just as we have seen with conventional press and magazine advertising. In reality, there is a hidden cost;- the time & focus it takes to be engaging in such activities and the loss of credibility when clearly abusing the system.

I’ve just written a report on the whole Web2.0 scenario for realty professionals in which I dispel 15 Web2.0 marketing myths,.. ‘Twitter’ is #6 on the list and I’ve pasted it below!

Myth #6; I can get more sales and ‘showing’ just by posting Tweets on Twitter.

Ok, so let’s not confuse myth #5 with myth #6. Once you have a Twitter account you’re not going to automatically create more showing or listing requests just by posting things like; “Just listed great 4-bedroom 3-bathroom home in Sunny Hills Estate,..check it out http;//tinyurl.com/345sfx”.

However, if you have created good follower interest and posted previous tidbits of interest as well as the occasional worthwhile link then you will be able to attract them to such a post or a redirected blog post that contains the link for the property listing. Maybe it could be a blog post with an image of the listed property that links to a specific website listing. You can always create a post indicating the various features of a recently listed property that appeal to you, and then just link to that post via Twitter.

The bottom line is that you need to be using Twitter creatively in order to win the respect of your “followers” attention rather than just creating a following of 2,000+ followers and then link-posting in the hope that someone will click the link. Personally I think its just self deceiving stupidity to purely seek to build lists of thousands of ‘followers’ & ‘followed’ people and then expecting to get any kind of focused result from it. If you have a bunch of disingenuous ‘followers’ (that are also following hundreds or thousands of others) then it’s most likely that they won’t ever see your Twitter posts at all. Better to work on generating genuinely interested followers that will be focused on seeing your relevant posts as they occur.

Cheers, Russell

For more details on my report  see this link  “Working Realty Smarter Web2.0″