I checked out EldersMandurah like you both suggested and agree they are tweeting really well. Good topics, consistent and engaging their followers.

HOWEVER

I manually went through about 10 pages of there followers and found virtually no local consumers following them. I think we all agree that ideally a real estate agent’s followers should be members of the local community.

Despite great content they are being followed primarily by :

1/ Local, interstate and international real estate agents

2/ Associated businesses trying to connect with real estate agents such as photographers, industry trainers coaches, portals, web designers etc etc

3/ Affilliate marketers and spammers.

In short virtually all of their followers are on Twitter for a commercial interest spewing out links and trying to drive traffic to their own website. Lots of Businsses but very very little real consumers. Everyone following them is trying to use Twitter to make a buck.

Go through the list and pass a critical on each follower like I did and in the last 200 followers I was lucky to find 5 or 6 accounts who could “possibly” be genuine locals who were not trying to flog their business or product.

I know you will probably say that some of those followers like yourselves are locals as well and that is right to a point, but to make it work like say Altitude does for Facebook we have to have real followers from the community. Altitude has a ton of agents “liking” (since fans are now gone!) on Facebook but there are massive amounts of locals there as well.

So yes whilst they tweet good I don’t think they have quite cracked the formula just yet to make Twitter successful for a typical real estate agent. They are certainly getting something right, but they are still missing something. I have no idea what that is though or else we would be doing it

I hold out hope but till we find someone that has the right recipe I honestly believe that Twitter is best as an information resource for agents from sources like yourselves.

We will all keep trying though

I think Pete had it right when he said agents tweet badly… its just that I think there is more in Twitter for the average agent than tweeting to get buyers which is unfortunately all what many seem to be interested in. As these lists show there is a wealth of information at their finger tips and they dont have to send out a single tweet.

As a mute point I would be interested to hear people’s opinions on the outsourcing of corporate (Twits come from 3rd party providers) and personal Tweeter accounts. Please don’t shoot the messenger here just curious it there is an established industry mood on it.

Services like Sobox might change that though.. but more on that soon

It can be a research tool as well as a publication tool. Agencies can also use a Private Twitter account within their office as an IM tool or Brainstorming tool using #hashtags to collate staff member’s thoughts on a topic.

They can use Twitter for prospecting (looking to engage with potential clients). It can be used a knowledge centre or simply a way of conversing via 140 characters at a time. (just like you would with SMS but rather over the web).

Yes, it can be used for posting listings and notifications about when a property is Open For Inspection or when an agent will be showing a particular property. (but it’s not the only use for Twitter)

I’m not saying don’t post listings. I know an agent who tweets about when he will be showing a home & he regularly gets 2 or 3 other buyers showing up to the inspection. It’s how he does it that gets him the results.

Twitter can be leveraged via plug-ins into blogs so that people can read your tweets when visiting blog articles. Tweets can also be automatically updated onto other Social Media platforms and blog posts like this one can be automatically submitted onto Twitter.

There’s so much more to Twitter than meets the eye & whilst I agree that there is no right or wrong way to use it, I believe that agents should try to get the most leverage out of using it that they possibly can.

There are a couple of accounts that do it well. @eldersmandurah–I think @aussiehome mentioned this to you on Twitter Glenn–and @stockerpreston. Both stay pretty clear of real estate–the occasional listing–and stick with community based info such as wine tours, surf reports, carnivals and the like. I’m yet to see an agent do it much better than @eldersmandurah.

Having said that, and as Glenn points out, there’s no perfect way to use Twitter.

If an agent chooses to use Twitter to follow useful and informative tweets and thats all they want to do then I believe Twitter is still a fantastic tool. This is what these articles about. IMHO over the next 30 days if an agent was to follow the 20 twitter accounts mentioned so far they will be introduced to more concepts, ideas, training and tips than they probably ever have before in such an easy manner. Thats a good thing.

To use Twitter to effectively market to your local area is going to be a very time consuming task. It also pretty skillful to perfect.

I know we don’t do it properly and I have yet to find someone who does it really well although I am a sure they are out there somewhere. There are plenty of agents with lots of followers out there but when you look at them they are mostly other agents, porn spammers, affiliate marketers and people from around the world let alone the same city or state. For the most part only a fraction of their followers are real local residents to their agency.

In essence Twitter is a social media therefore it can do information exchange but even if someone uses it primarily as an information resource through a one way flow of information isn’t that better than no exchange of information at all?

I like twitter but IMHO it is better used in our industry as a B2B tool rather than a B2C tool at least for the majority of agents.