Real Estate Website Content - The Twitter Alerts Two-fer

There's a lot to do to keep up our Web presence, double results with this tip.

By James Kimmons, About.com Guide

You know, a two-fer, when you get double for your money, or two for the price of one. Using Twitter to release short local real estate market alerts gives you the ability to use them again on your website or blog. But, you'll only be writing your alert once.

First, lets define a local market "alert." It is any piece of information that's a current statistic, status update, or even an announcement of some real estate related event. This works well inside the 140 character Tweet limit, and it's a fast and easy thing for you to write. After all, Twitter is being touted as THE best way to micro-blog, or put out breaking news as it happens.

So, first you need to set up a system to get the news to you so that you can get it out. Of course, if you're at a planning and zoning meeting, and you hear that a new subdivision finally got approved, no problem. You just get it into your Twitter account via a text message or on your computer. But, there is so much more going on that you may not hear about until it's old news, unless you have a way to get it delivered to you for re-publishing. Here are some ways:

• Learn to use a feed reader and subscribe to RSS feeds from local and national real estate blogs to get news delivered. You can have it sent to you via email as well.
• Set up "Google Alerts" to bring you news on key phrases as Google finds it on the Web.
• Follow those on Twitter that are good sources for local news. I follow a local public relations person who works for the town. He puts out a huge amount of information every week about what's going on locally.
• The best - use your MLS system to report daily market information, price changes, days on market averages, inventory, etc. My system will email alerts to me, rather than requiring a login to search for it. I get price change alerts as they are entered by agents.

Now, you have multiple resources bringing you a great number of "newsy" items about your local area, and stats changing daily in your market reported by the MLS. It's just a matter of Tweeting them up to Twitter, and making sure that you make the best use of the 140 character limit. It's "headlining" and "sound bites" at their best. I like to do my market alerts with something like "MyTown real estate market alert - days on market dropping! Average down from 187 to 153 today." That's not even 100 characters, and you've given a valuable bit of information about the market as breaking news.

OK, that's great, but what do I mean about the "two-fer?" Now that you've found a fast way to get these alerts out there, what about your website or blog? It's a little more time consuming to get a new post into the blog, and definitely to create something for the website. But, you don't have to. All blogs, and most of your websites, allow you to use "widgets" to display an RSS feed. Your Twitter page produces a feed, so you merely set up the widget to display that feed. Now, when you post to Twitter, it shows up again as an item in your site widget.

Because I also Tweet about local events and news items, I wanted my site to limit the feed displayed just to real estate alerts. No problem. If you go to http://search.twitter.com, and place a key phrase in there that you'll use in every Tweet, you'll only show those that apply. I use "MyTown real estate alert:" When I search on that, I get only those Tweets that have that phrase, and Twitter Search gives me a RSS feed for that search. Then I'm displaying precisely what I want in my site widget. Carry that out to a more exciting prospect. If you do a lot of Tweeting about local government as an example, Start each Tweet with "YourTown local government alert:" and use that feed to produce a widget for another location on your site.

Sometimes your Tweet can be as easy as simply re-tweeting one of those you follow. My public relations person puts out a lot of tweets, many that I read, but don't want to have on my site. But, when I see one I want, it's one click to re-tweet what he said to my Twitter page. Then, it's also going to show up in my site widget box. Though Twitter is growing rapidly, there are many who visit my site that don't use it, so the display of the Tweet feed on the site gets the information out there for them.

Just when you think it can't get any easier, it does! You can use Jott.com to call in your Tweet, and you'll never have to type a word. Jott converts your speech to text and it shows up on your Twitter page. So, there's no excuse for not getting that breaking news out because you don't have your computer. You can also text in your Tweets directly to Twitter once it knows your cell phone number.