Next Tuesday will mark the anniversary of the first post published on this blog. It was entitled “The Fox” and was meant to set the stage for future discussions about how far Durham has come since I saw a fox running down Chapel Hill Street near the post office in Downtown Durham in 1985. To me it was a sign that nature was reclaiming the crumbling and increasingly abandoned heart of our city.
Recently I freshened up the look of the site’s graphics a little bit and initiated a Twitter version of the site. Twitter, if you’ve been in a coma for the last couple of years, is for “mini-blogging.” Posts are limited to 140 characters so you have to be pretty concise. Anyone with a Twitter account of their own can “follow” you from their account. Twitter accounts are free and very easy to set up. So far I’ve built a modest following of about 120 folks. You can also insert your Twitter posts on a regular website like I’ve done in the sidebar on the left.
My original intention was to simply post information about new listings in the Durham luxury market but the temptation to put other things there was too great. Part of the fun of twitter is to building an audience of followers which you do by following other twitterers that you identify by conducting searches on particular topics. Others are doing the same thing and find me. So I get several emails a day with messages that somebody is following durhamluxre or my other twitter account, zenmanrdu, which I set up for another purpose.
This leads you to some strange places. By far, most of my followers on both accounts are others with real estate interests, including REALTORs from all over the country and many places in the world. One of my earliest followers was from a guy who runs a listing service for properties in France. What he’s trying to do, of course, is provide a point of contact for anyone who has a client interested in buying a property in France. The cost of him doing this is negligible. Most of his posts are very short descriptions of a piece of property and a link (often shortened by a service called Tinyurl.com to fit the 140 character format) to more information on the property.
The best of all worlds for him is that something “goes viral,” that is, somebody sees something of interest and “retweets” the post, which immediately shares it with his followers, some of who will start to follow the original twitterer. Eventually, the theory goes, somebody who knows somebody who is looking for a property in France will forward the post or his website link and a connection is made.
Here’s an example. Because of the nature of DurhamLuxRE.com, I get followed by people with some interest in luxury stuff. This morning I got a follow from a twitterer in New York City who is an antique dealer who specializes in portrait miniatures. To be perfectly honest about it, I had no idea that this was a collectible category. But if I “retweet” her post on my account, all who follow me will also see it. (If you’re interested, the website is www.archibaldminiatures.com.)
Because the DurhamLuxRE.com link is part of the profile on my DurhamLuxRE twitter account, traffic to this site has more than doubled since I started twittering. Sometime during anniversary week I will post the quarterly report about first quarter activity in the Durham luxury market and also do a “tweet” or twitter post at both of my accounts about. It will be interesting to see what that does to traffic here at the site.
All this effort during the last year will be worth it if it has the desired effect of spreading the word that Durham is an interesting and fun place to live, work raise families and, of course, look for luxury properties.
