Trulia Beats Zillow in Twittering
May 14, 2008 – 4:06 pmFirst off. What is Twitter? Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
I just started getting into twittering and to be honest I think it is stupid. I barely have enough time to take a shower no less tell the world what I am doing at any given moment in time.
With all this said, Twitter, is becoming a potential marketing machine. Compete.com estimates their monthly traffic to be about 1.1 million uniques a month. This estimate is most likely way low since many users twitter using their phone.
One real estate company that has taken advantage of this marketing conversation is Trulia.com. Using the twitter search service Summize, we can see that for the last 30 days there has been a total of 645 tweets with Trulia mentioned and 210 tweets with Zillow mentioned.
Now to be fair, a vast amount of tweets with trulia mentioned comes from one user, Trulia. About 293 tweets have been made by Trulia.
Looking at who Trulia communicates with, it seems many of these tweets are to real estate bloggers and real estate press. Trulia has utilized Tweeter as a way to communicate with industry press and start a friendly conversation with them. It is a lot easier to write something nice about a company if you think they are your friend.
5 Responses to “Trulia Beats Zillow in Twittering”
I use twitter actually to follow top bloggers, so I don’t twitter much myself, I just follow.
I thought it was stupid at first, but now I can see some true power behind it.
But then it is down a lot right now.
By Dave Dugdale on May 14, 2008
As for Zillow’s use of twitter — we haven’t found twitter to be an effective social media marketing initiative. You can see David’s response to this post on FoREM for more background on the issue.
By Drew Meyers from Zillow on May 14, 2008
Hi!
Hey, thanks for noticing! We love twitter.
As far as Social Media tools are concerned, Twitter has been a fantastic tool that has helped us connect directly with our fans on a more personal level while at the same time, introducing us to many other fantastic people. I highly recommend it. The key is to be genuine and make sure you have something of value to add. Of course, much of the small talk that the public may see is just the introduction to a deeper conversation behind the scenes.
Rudy
Social Media Guru at Trulia
By Rudy from Trulia on May 15, 2008
I will agree with Rudy that Twitter is fast becoming a must have tool.
By Dave Dugdale on May 15, 2008
I am going to give this more of a shot. I have begun to follow people. Lets see how this goes.
By Dan Daugherty on May 16, 2008