A Simple Way To Find Real Estate Leads On Twitter

Posted by Justin on 25 August 2010

TweetIf you've been wondering all this time what Twitter is all about then join the club! I've never been a big fan of it myself, for various reasons, but it's hugely popular with millions of people using it so you cannot afford to ignore it.

As an estate agent I'm sure you've often wondered how you can use it for your business, particularly in terms of generating leads.

There are various ways you can work Twitter, which I'm going to be covering in depth in some future tutorials. But today I just wanted to demonstrate one of the simplest ways you could put Twitter to work for you right now.

We're going to be using the Twitter Search facility, which you can find at http://search.twitter.com. The idea behind this simple activity is to find people who are talking about looking for property.

Here's an example that I just tried:



I've typed into the Twitter search box "I'm looking for apartment". You can see that if you were an estate agent in Spain, covering the Almeria area, that first result there is someone actively looking for an apartment in Almeria! That took all of 5 seconds to find and it was posted just 1 hour ago. You could now send that prospect a direct message on Twitter or respond to their post.

Now, it's important to note that the Twitter search facility is nowhere near as advanced as Google, so if you enter "I'm looking for AN apartment" you will get a different results, so just be aware of that.

Now, let's try another. Say we search for "I'm looking for property":



In the first two results we have someone looking for a Spanish property and another looking for a commercial property in Florida. Another two leads! I think you get the gist now. Depending on the market your serve and how people refer to properties in your area or country, then you can tailor the search phrase accordingly. You can also be more specific by including your area or trying other search words such as "I'm searching for" or "Can anyone recommend an estate agent", etc.

Now, I hear you saying "but I can't keep doing this for every phrase every day...can I?". Well actually there is no need to, because Twitter comes to the rescue again. At the top right of the search results page is a link that says "Feed for this query". Take that link and add it into an RSS reader such as Google Reader. Then just fire up Google Reader every morning and see who's house hunting on Twitter!

Surely, things don't get much easier than that?

Tags: Twitter

Comments (12)

Sparkes says: 25 Aug 2010	What a fantastic bit of advice. I thought twitter was a total waste to time and just something to follow celebs on but I may have been converted.

SarahParker says: 25 Aug 2010	Great tip, thank you for sharing that. I am off to set up my RSS feeds.

Steve Varney says: 25 Aug 2010	You seem to have more ideas in an hour than I do in a week

Justin says: 25 Aug 2010	Thanks Steve...but that's what I do all day whilst you're selling properties!

Andrew says: 25 Aug 2010	I'm off to revisit my twitter account that I never use- Great tip.

jason says: 26 Aug 2010	Looks like a great tool for finding targeted prospects. I can see how this service could be useful for many different people looking for a targeted audience.

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