Tweetness in Tacoma
Let's pretend for a moment that I'm a well established Real Estate agent in Tacoma, WA. I have three listings under $350k and I have a twitter account. How would I leverage twitter to attract web traffic to my listings?

Here's how I would do it.

Appearance
First I would make sure that my twitter account reflects my brand in word and deed. I would add my ubiquitous profile photo (the same one that I use for my retaggr card, fast company profile, etc...), and a crisp background image. And most importantly, I would be sure to add a link to my main website and add a good bio to my profile. Piece of cake. For photos that need cropping or touching up, I'd use picnick.com. For really cool stock photos, I would check out istockphoto.com.

Think global, Tweet Local
If I wanted to engage with an audience of local tweeple in Tacoma, I would use the twitter search feature to find people who have tweeted about Tacoma. Here's an example of a search for tweets that include the word "Tacoma". How cool is that? Now that I know who is talking about my town of choice, I can check them out and decide if I want to follow them. Chances are, they will follow me back if I am tweeting about meaningful, interesting, and engaging things. And once we're following each other, there's an even greater opportunity to engage in a conversation about our common interest.

If you're looking for more ways to find locals, try using the twitter search for unique points of interest - i.e. parks, local churches, unique local restaurants, you get the idea...

The Tasty Tweet
Now that I have a local audience that I'm engaging with, I can take the opportunity to salt my tweets tastefully with information that relates to my listings. Maybe I have a blog with information about the amenities or restaurants in the North end of Tacoma (near one of my listings). I could tweet a link to that. Maybe there's a price reduction on one of my listings. Maybe there's an open house coming up. Or, maybe I've taken some interesting video footage of the neighborhood near my listing... If it's interesting, engaging, or useful for my audience, I'll put a link to it in my tweets.

Just like sowing and reaping, if you put good stuff out to the right audience on twitter, you'll see opportunity grow!

Enjoy!

Matt Sweet
Ticor IT Marketing