|
If you live in Washington Heights or Inwood and are a Twitter.com user, you’ve probably seen some tweets from Principle Broker Milton Coste.
“What it does is drive traffic to my website,” said Coste, a partner at Montilla’s 159 Real Estate, located at W. 159th Street and Broadway. “Social media becomes social marketing.”
Newspaper classifieds for apartments were out-teched by the instant world of free classifieds at craigslists.org. Nowadays, craigslists, and an agent’s own website, are the mainstays in the real estate listings world. Coste is exploring whether Twitter.com and his facebook.com fan page are the next new world of listings.
For those outside of the social media world, Twitter.com is a service with its own language. Everyone has a username which starts with the @ symbol – Coste’s is @159realestate. Twitterers “tweet” short messages of 140 characters or less from their mobile phones or computers to their “followers” and start or end their statements with searchable keywords prefaced by the # symbol so others can follow topics of conversation. Users can also introduce short URL addresses to direct readers to a website, and when you log in to Twitter.com you see all the posts of the people you are following.
For example, people talking about Northern Manhattan on Twitter use #WaHi and #Inwood when they tweet about the neighborhood. Other websites that plug into Twitter.com allow users to share photos over the service.
Coste tweets apartments he has available, like “#rental #WaHi #apt ***No Fee***Exposed Brick***Two Bedroom*** (Inwood / Wash Hts) $1595 2bd: ... http://bit.ly/bnevb3 #fb #Inwood #harlem.”
“It’s in its infant stage right now, but I think it’s a great thing,” Coste said.
In this brave new world of social media, a prospective tenant looking for an apartment in Washington Heights, might just search for #rental #WaHi on his or her smart phone on the bus or at home on your computer and see all the listings in the area, with all the important details of the apartment condensed into a sentence or two.
Right now, they’d just find Coste’s tweets.
Coste said it’s hard to determine how many rentals he’s gotten since he started tweeting his listings four months ago, because many don’t mention it when they visit the office, but he has seen people forward his listings.
“You follow people and they follow you back,” Coste said. “Even if they don’t, they might know someone who is [looking for an apartment] and re-tweet it.”
Coste doesn’t put up all his listings online, he doesn’t have the time. But since starting, he’s tweeted almost 5,000 listings, and said he’s looking to hire more web-savvy agents to do the same thing.
Coste said Twitter is perfect for the 20-30 year old demographic of his customers.
“Think about it. Who’s using Twitter? People who are young and move around,” he said.
“[And] you know what it costs? – Nothing.”
|
