Twitter has been making serious changes in recent months, and they’ll all impact how you use the platform for your business.
Twitter is among the most useful social media platforms for real estate agents today, but like all forms of modern technology, it updates at such a radical pace that even experts experience difficulties keeping up.
So with that in mind, we’ve highlighted the most transformative changes yet for Twitter in 2015, all of which will have a profound impact on how you utilize the website for your business.
1. Retweeting with Comments – Twitter’s 140-character limit has often made it difficult to convey complex topics, especially when you are retweeting information with your own commentary.
Twitter obviously realized that limitation, and it recently responded with a new retweet policy, which allows users to comment on retweets with no character limits. So whether you’re retweeting one of our awesome stories or a listing you shared earlier on your feed, you can add text to the retweet without any 140-character anxieties.
One thing we should mention is that media files (such as Vines and images) appear smaller with retweeted comments, so you should bear that in mind.
2. Easier Searching – #Discover used to be Twitter’s big system of exploration, but now, it provides summaries of trending topics, which describe the topic, the media file associated with it and the number of tweets that have been sent.
The perk of this new feature is that it allows users to follow breaking news topics in real time, so whether it’s a new report on home prices or the government’s latest jobs report, you’ll have no problems keeping tabs on what topics are trending.
3. Slo-Mo Video – You can now upload slow-motion videos along with your tweets. Though “slo-mo” is often horribly tacky, it could prove an interesting method for spotlighting a specific feature in a listing.
4. Live Streaming – This is perhaps the most audacious update of all. Via Twitter’s acquisition of video app Periscope in January, the website now offers live-streaming capabilities, an offering that has put it in direct contact with Meerkat, a live-streaming app.
As Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes pointed out, it’s uncertain whether live streaming will grow beyond its initial fad status, but if Twitter develops the concept in bold and interesting ways, we could see a whole new take on the virtual tour.
5. Group DMs/Tweet Summaries – Finally, Twitter now offers both direct messages to groups of users (which could be hugely helpful when communicating with myriad groups) and “While You Were Away” summaries, which provide a list of the most popular tweets when you sign back in to Twitter.
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