Twitter announced yesterday the roll out of Local Trending Topics.(We knew they would be putting to good use their purchase of GeoAPI last month). This is a big event for the real estate industry and for real estate bloggers especially. “Who cares what I ate for lunch yesterday?” you ask…. it’s not that, it is the ability to have your finger on the pulse of your local community in real time like never before (and leveraging that power)…
Think about it… you see a big news topic trending on Twitter and write a blog about it. When someone Googles the topic, you have a good chance of coming up high on Google, pulling people to your blog and positioning you as the go-to blog for hot local info, often scooping those asleep at the switch.
OR a news reporter shoots out a request for comments on the hot trending topic and you answer them (this happens OFTEN!) and you end up as a quoted source. Great! (This technique landed us on top of the 6 PM news when Obama announced the Help for Homeowners Plan, can you say priceless?) You will become friends with local news reporters and be possible future sources as well.
At a minimum, you will become a highly knowledgeable source on your most current local news. Twitter is FASTER than local papers, TV and other sources due to the real time nature. People post video clips and other live media (Ustream). What if you were capturing those links on your own site?
Right now there are only a select few cities, but plans to roll out more are in the works.
If you couldn’t think of a way to use Twitter specifically for real estate before, with this new Super Local capacity, you might just think differently now….
Janie has been in the development, construction and real estate industries for over 20 years. She began her career in commerical construction and has slowly worked into all of the related industries and added residential properties to her resume 7 years ago. She is currently the co-owner of sister companies, Papillon Real Estate and Papillon ReDevelopment (a construction and project management firm). Janie blogs for The Coral Gables Story. In her "free" time, she is a graduate student of Atlantic History with a focus on the history of business and technology. She is a lover of geo-anything. She loves the story.
Lani Rosales
January 27, 2010 at 10:46 pm
I love the concept of using this for business, it’s so simplestupid!
On a sidenote, people in my city are FURIOUS that we (Austin) were excluded. Twitter was launched here and people feel ownership over it, I have 11 emails from last night of people venting that Houston, Dallas and San Antonio made the list but Austin, the birth place and one of the most highly adoptive tech cities in the nation was neglected. Wonder how soon it will pop up on the list? I’m betting it’s next…
Susie Blackmon
January 28, 2010 at 4:14 am
Many great uses come to mind. 😉