Real Estate Agents and Brokers Use Twitter to Find Prospects and Sell Homes

The Associated Press reported just this last week about a growing trend for realtors to use the popular site Twitter.com to find buyers for their homes. The "tweets" (140 characters or less announcements) read like a minimal ad:

"Listing coming. Hurry if you have buyers. Under $500K, 2,190 feet. 3Bed 2.5Bth."

While this could be useful in getting the word out it doesn't seem to work like other information sent out. Stuff like this tends to not get "retweeted".

I've noticed another trend among Salt Lake real estate agents and Twitter that, while tempting to do, isn't a very effective way of garnering your target audience as followers (and target audience is the key to being effective on Twitter). Tweets like, "I'm from Salt Lake. I'm an entrepreneur and real estate investor." or "Asset Based Lending Credit Analyst- Real Estate/Property Jobs,Recruiter,Salt Lake City, UT, United States" don't mean much to people. However, some effective real estate Twitterers I have taken note of do the following:

1. They tend to engage on a personal level with others.
2. They tweet out deals they have going on and in what area of town they are in.
3. They give their tweets a hashtag so others can find them on a Twitter search.
4. They tweet out useful information.
5. They tweet every day.

It takes time and patience to build the right audience on Twitter. You can build an audience by offering the tried and true method of giveaways or by retweeting for others of course. That will build your following. But if you want to be truly effective and gather that golden target audience it is important to tweet out useful information and participate in a meaningful and helpful way every day.

Read more from the Los Angelos Associated Press article