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Twitter is one of a number of “micro-blogging” platforms currently in use by Realtors and other real estate professionals as well as consumers, businesspeople, students and anyone else who likes to scan headline-sized chunks of information.

This page will help serve as a starting ground for anyone looking to use Twitter for business with special attention paid to the real estate industry (i.e. a high-touch lead-generation focused industry) and will be updated over time. I was inspired to create this page due to general chatter about Twitter for Real Estate.

If I am missing something please don’t hesitate to let me know so I can include it.

Getting started with Twitter

• Daniel Rothamel gives you all the basics in Welcome to Social Media for Real Estate 101: Twitter.
• How to write kickass Twitter posts gives you a great list of guidelines to give the most with your tweeting and prevents you from being dull.
• Ok, you know how to post something useful to Twitter, how do you start listening? After all, conversations go both ways and you usually profit more by listening. Time to read Jeff Turner’s Active Rain post about TwitterLocal.
• What’s TwitterLocal you ask? Look no further than PR 2.0 post “Twitter Local Connects You to Local Voices.”

Use Case Scenarios: How do others use Twitter for business?

Lead Generation

Jeremy Hart at NRVLiving generates leads using Twitter.

Conferences and Group Information-Sharing Events:

• Using Twitter to Stay in Touch at Connect gives a nice little rundown plus one use for the technology: keeping in touch during conferences.
• Transparent Real Estate has more Twitter for Conferences information.

Reputation Management (you don’t even have to participate in Twitter to get value from these links)

• Joel Burslem’s Using Twitter to Listen to your Customers reviews the excellent Reputation Management tool TweetScan. Includes examples.
• Example of reputation management from 37Signals at the Twitter blog.
• One of my favorite sites, Read/Write/Web, describes customer service teams at Comcast, Dell and others using Twitter to close the loop on Reputation Management and actually solve customer issues, via Twitter. Mmmmm listening leading to action, got to love that. Bonus link to a comment that Comcast left on a blog regarding the practice.

Trendwatching

• Jessica Swesey is using Twitter to listen to general chatter about the real estate market. From there she can get a sense of boots-on-the-ground activity in the Twittersphere (insert buzzword apology here).

Broadcasting

• Once you get a group of people following your Twitter feed, perhaps Information Week’s suggestion for using it as a broadcast medium will be useful.

Getting out of Jail

• Hat tip to BHB for posting this link about a guy, arrested in Egypt during a protest, who was able to notify friends around the world and ultimately helped get him out jail.

General Use Case Scenarios for Twitter

• A laundry list of uses and examples can be found at Examples of Twitter Providing Business Benefits.
• Business benefits and basic usage suggestions are at Twitter: Where’s it @ for Business.
• Jessica Swesey lets us in on monetizing your Twitter account by selling it.

Tools and Tech: Enhancing your Twitter experience or your customers’ Twitter experience.

• If, like me, you don’t much care for Twitter’s interface, check out the list of Twitter clients (I’m partial to Twitterific for my iPod).
• A list of various tools to help you get more out of Twitter can be found at Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy blog.
• Advanced Twitter: Hashtags is for those of you who are ready to dig in a little deeper or are looking for a channel style method of keeping up with topics.
• Eric Bryant over at Geekestate points us to a quick review of GroupTweet (for mass twittering), TweetScan (Twitter search engine), Twubble (find more followers based on the followers you currently have), TwitterAnswers (ask and answer questions via Twitter) and Straw Poll (diversion poll).
• Loren Nason over at the Future of Real Estate Technology found a list of 20 Twitter tools for your cell phone, including some screen shots and little write ups for each.

Twitter Naysaying

It can’t all be as good and fun and useful as people say. In the interest of providing some balanced discourse, I’ll provide anti-Twitter posts too.

• “I’m Over Twitter” by Misha Cornes brings up three significant shortcomings of Twitter. Her summation of Twitter should serve as a warning:
  

  Tweets, if you can consider them personal communications at all, are a declaration of existence rather than an invitation to engage in a conversation.

• Mark from Court’s Internet Marketing School ( a font of internet marketing ideas) explains why Twitter is Stupid. If you want to read just one post to dissuade you from using Twitter for marketing, this is the one.

Did I miss anything?