Micro-blogging - Breaking News for Real Estate

Pat Kitano, over at Transparent RE, posted about micro-blogging for real estate. Micro-blogging is being defined as immediate posting of breaking news, with little or no delay using Twitter and other immediate posting sites.


Pat mentions the delay in RSS feeds, as they are dependent upon the subscriber's reader, and how often it requests to be updated. He also differentiates between the two types of blogging, as one is much more immediate than the other, allowing a real estate professional to release "breaking news" type items for immediate display, say on a Twitter page. As Twitter feeds can also be displayed on other networking sites, such as Facebook, this would create an instantaneous, or close to it, breaking real estate news service some people would like.


I'm not sure how many real estate professionals actually have enough "breaking news" type of items to release in this way, or how many people actually would want to get them, but some may choose to receive them as text messages or in other ways that are very immediate in nature. Here are two ways to get this done:


* Immediate WordPress Post to Twitter - Using the Birdfeeder plugin, I've tested and a post is immediately fed to Twitter from a WordPress blog. However, unless you want all of your posts to go out immediately, this plugin won't help. It doesn't allow selecting posts for immediate release to your Twitter account. If it's truly "breaking news" you want to treat this way, you could have a blog set up just for these releases, thus all posts would apply.

* A 5 to 30 Minute Release - I know of one way to get blog posts to Twitter in 5 to 30 minutes. I use Twitterfeed, which takes my RSS feed and sends the posts to Twitter. Twitterfeed will check your feed every 30 minutes (sorry no quicker), and send the post to Twitter.

* I have found most getting there in under 30 minutes, many in five or so. If it's been 25 minutes since the last check, and I hit the publish button, then the post will get there faster. I send all of my posts there, but you could create a category just for "breaking news," and use that category to feed a special Twitter account just for this purpose. I think that I don't have any news that can't wait a half hour.


Think about whether you really have information that will have enhanced value if immediately delivered. If not, you may risk losing followers who find that your "breaking news" isn't useful news.