By now, we’ve all heard the joke about brokers and the fax machine. It’s no secret that commercial real estate has a dinosaur reputation when it comes to technology but times “they are a changing”- sort of. Some brokers have embraced it while others haven’t.
While Facebook- Does it Extend to CRE? pointed to split camps on Facebook and CRE, there is less debate on Twitter, social media’s 140-character microblog. Twitter is a conversation where experts come out on top of an array of business topics including our industry’s very own #CRE.
However, not everyone or every top broker is on Twitter: an evaluation of the top 3 brokers (as determined by Co-Star’s annual awards) across 3 disciplines in New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago showed that none of these brokers had Twitter accounts.
With that said, there is an excellent community of brokers, brokerage firms and CRE services on Twitter performing some highly effective habits:
1. They are framing themselves as CRE experts by offering their opinion and feedback on various topics, articles and their own blog.
2. They are using Twitter to promote their Twitter newsletters, blogs and websites.
3. They insert a little personality and conversation to take away some of the “your broker is invested in the sale more than you” façade.
4. They are forging relationships with others.
5. They are creating excellent name recognition with their strong presences online. You often see the same names come up over and over again for recommended tweeters as they align themselves with the connotation of #cre.
Just as important as what one does, there are “don’ts” that effective CRE tweeters practice as well:
1. They are not promoting their spaces or at least, not to excess. While it seems to be a more popular practice on other mediums such as Pinterest, few major tweeters are listing spaces on Twitter
2. They are not spamming followers with useless and annoying information and hopefully, not viruses.
3. They are not going off topic: top CRE tweeters are known for their CRE expertise. They are not known for their sports knowledge, photos of their family or anything else.
Are you part of the #CRE community yet? If not, no better time than the present to get started and find us @officespace!