Have you ever tweeted with or followed any realtors on Twitter? If you have, you may have noticed the tendency for many realtors to include house listings in their tweets.
While links to specific listings might be helpful to a small percentage of a realtor’s target audience for those specific properties, it’s probably not the best way to engage a wider audience and build a sense of community with prospective clients.
So what’s a realtor to do? Here are four examples of realtors that are using Twitter creatively to engage their audiences and to use Twitter as more than just a listings engine. If you’re in the real estate industry, use these examples as inspiration as to how you might use Twitter more creatively to market your properties and yourself.
1. Turn an Open House Into a Tweetup
In October, 20111, David Greenlees, a realtor at Coldwell Banker in St. Petersburg, Florida, had a creative idea. He decided to hold a tweetup at one of his properties instead of a traditional Open House.
By tweeting about the event in advance to his local Twitter community, he got more than double the number of attendees than he usually gets at his Open House events. Greenlees encouraged attendees to upload photos of the home to Twitter; he noticed a dramatic increase in pageviews to his listing of this property as as result.
“Not only did the attendees post photos and info on the event, many of their friends on social networking websites re-tweeted and reposted the photos, giving the event a longer life past the time of the actual event,” said Greenlees.
A tweetup is not much different, nor is it any more difficult to set up than a traditional Open House. Yet the audience that attends a tweetup is probably more likely to talk about the event, and share the details with their online networks than a traditional Open House audience. If this approach worked for David Greenlees, it may work for you too. Reach out to David on Twitter at @Davidwrg.
2. Host a Real Estate Twitter Chat
Sometimes, establishing yourself as a leader among your peers is a good way to build your reputation and increase your profile on Twitter. Matt Pici, a realtor in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, takes this approach every week by hosting a popular Twitter chat called, appropriately enough, #realestatechat.
Although the participants of this Twitter chat are primarily realtors or real estate professionals, Matt points out on his website that this chat is open to “everyone who loves real estate — realtors, developers, homeowners, sellers, investors, designers” and so on.
Matt does a great job of moderating this Twitter chat by asking the realtors in attendance to comment on specific topics like commissions, brokerages, marketing ideas and more. This approach appears to be paying off for Matt — his last Twitter chat was represented by realtors from 11 different states and two different countries! Contact @MattPiciRealty to find out when the next #realestate chat is in session!
3. Tweet as a House
Many realtors create custom domain names and websites based on the addresses of their listings. But as far as we can tell, @229RockGlen is the first, and perhaps the only house to ever to tweet on Twitter.
Ryan Hartman, a real estate agent from York, Pennsylvania, created a Twitter account for one of his house listings. Tweets from the account, such as “I’m in a beautiful neighborhood with a great school district” are not only funny but they also offer useful information about the home and the neighborhood it’s in.
We’re not sure if the house sold, and the account has not been updated in quite some time, but it still serves as a great example of a realtor thinking way outside of the traditional box when it comes to marketing properties on Twitter.
4. Break the Mold
Realtors are often some of the best dressed, nicely coiffed professionals you’re likely to meet. Image, appearance and presentation are important when you’re dealing with sales in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars.
To that end, the Twitter bios of some real estate professionals tend to look a little familiar — professional to be sure, but often prominently listing accolades like “#1 Realtor in the State” or including the name of the brokerages they work for. While this may be both impressive and effective, Kashlee Parmiter from Regina, Saskatchewan takes a different approach. The first line of her Twitter bio speaks volumes about the type of person you’re going to be dealing with if you hire Kashlee as your realtor: “Firstly, nerd.”
Scroll through Parmiter’s tweet stream and you won’t find one listing posted. Instead, you’ll see lots of conversations, with lots of different people. In other words, not only is her bio engaging, she is engaging with her community. See for yourself at @KashleeDoll.
While this might not seem like a particularly creative approach for a realtor using Twitter, it’s surprisingly uncommon to see realtors engaging so conversationally on Twitter. Links to properties and real estate information may be helpful and even necessary in some markets, but Kashlee has discovered that for her target audience at least, conversation trumps listings every time.
