I was looking at this approach to promote our discount offer for the RedX listing lead system, but it’s possibilities are so much greater.  The advantage of Twitter for real estate and mortgage professionals is that prospective clients post their needs online all day long.  Thanks to this fantastic new technology, you get instant visibility to a prospective client’s needs, the second that he mentions them.  It is then just a matter of making contact, offering your services, and working the relationship.

So how would you use this new technology to attract listing or selling clients?  Well, getting a new lead is a simple as using one of the many available Twitter mashups that notify you when someone posts a target keyphrase.  Combine that with a basic geo-targeted mashup and you have a system that will tell you when someone in your area posts text that could be considered a lead.  

In writing that paragraph, it sounds a bit more complicated then it really is.  Therefore, I’ll use an example.   Suppose you are an agent that specializes in short sales or foreclosure.  You would set up a notification service like Easy Tweets to notify you when someone posts the terms “short sale”  “list of foreclosures” “home shopping” “looking at neighborhoods” “bidding on foreclosure” “looking for realtor” etc.  When any twitter user posts these terms, you will get notified.  The next step is to simply Follow these prospects in your own Twitter account and use a geo-targeting twitter mashup (there are a number of them out there) to determine if the poster is local to you.  For those posters that are in your vicinity, simply reply by direct message to their post and courting them as an active prospect.

I have been looking for a geo-targeted system that combines the easy tweet notification system with geo targeting so that you only get notified about people in your area.  However, I have yet to find that service.  Because of that, you may need to sift through potential leads from across the US.  If you do know of a system that combines the geo targeting with the keyword notification, let us all know.