February 09 2011
I started using Twitter again recently because of some blog posts that I read by some pretty influential people.
What is Twitter? Twitter is a very easy-to-use, real-time messaging system for groups and friends. Another way to think of it would be text messaging (or instant messaging) from one person to many people at the same time. The length of each message is about 1 sentence (140 characters).
Twitter is free and easy to use. When I got started with Twitter in June of 2007, it was a relatively new thing. The company launched in March of 2006. My first reaction was "interesting waste of time."
Now Twitter has grown up, but is still in the early adopter phase, and can still be a waste of time. Those using it "bend" toward technology professionals, and it is popular among real estate bloggers.
Today, I see the following uses which can make Twitter valuable for real estate professionals.
For real estate technology companies
Twitter allows you to tune into activities among your peers, competitors, and industry thought leaders. It is good to stay tuned to what they are doing and share what you are doing to this group of highly influential personalities. And, it can be very entertaining.
For real estate brokers
Twitter is a method that allows you to communicate en masse to all of your agents about business information in real-time. Announce important reminders, price changes, rate changes, new listings, sold listings, trainings, meetings, events, etc., to all of your agents with one message. It can, in effect, act like a company "Intranet" that delivers messages to each of your agent's phones in real-time using text messaging. It is a very engaging system that can be used but hopefully not abused. 2 or 3 messages at most a day would be tolerable (my guess).
For real estate teams
Twitter is a way to connect the daily activities and movements of team members. Twitter showings for the day, price changes, team meetings, task accomplishments, etc. Teams can currently communicate through transaction management systems and other platforms, but they usually require each team member to have a smartphone. Twitter works on any phone with text messaging capabilities.
If you think this might be of value to you, sign up and try it.
Here is how you get started:
Twitter Language
Twitter Tips and Tricks
1. Get Twhirl. This is a program that allows you to Twitter on your desktop computer.
To use Twhirl, you will first need to download Adobe Air. The link to download it is on the Twhirl homepage at http://twhirl.com. After installing Adobe Air, download the Twhirl application.
2. Get familiar with tinyurl.com. It will let you take a link like:
into:
Which is very important if you only have 140 letters and you want to Twitter message about.
Have fun! Social networks will not harm you.
To read the original WAV Group blog post, please click here.
To learn more about WAV Group, please click here