Tweeting over the humble white picket fence @17BanksiaStreet highlights ever expanding digital era
There was something oddly sweet when a humble weatherboard home behind a white picket fence on a 594 square metre block at 17 Banksia Street, BENTLEIGH East in Melbourne followed me on Twitter recently.
Talk about old world meets new via social media in the digital realm.
It's just a tiny tactic to possibly gain a little more attention for the auction from me and my somewhat paltry 1,480 Twitter followers before it goes to 21 June hockingstuart auction in conjunction with Vendor Marketing with $620,000 plus hopes (pictured below).
Listing and inspection times has been its only tweets so far, so nothing too personal yet.
There's just the 11 following the house which is currently following 52 other twitter accounts, including Bryce, Larry and Petra.
Of course the free Twitter placement is still only popular with a certain market audience, and certainly not embraced by all. I was a late adapter starting only three years ago this October.
The most garrulous house I've come across was 8 Yarra Bank Court in Abbotsford which signed up to a Twitter account in an 2012 attempt to harness social media to sell the property.
Every day or so the house tweeted another comment about how things are going in the area and what a joy it is to live there.
After joining Twitter the account had 272 followers after 21 days, and sold for $1.93 million.
The Twitter campaigns are part of an emerging social media trend in Australia, started back in early 2012 by Northcote resident Kurt Opray.
He reckons his Northcote house sold for $135,000 above his reserve price after signing the house up to Twitter and YouTube and starting a blog. As a pioneer, it had generated huge publicity on old media, via print and television coverage. Kurt even went onto establishing a company that packaged and promoted the medium, though hasn't really been mentioned much over the past two years judging by a google search.
Meanwhile I recently noticed real estate experienced its strongest result on record for Australian online advertising in the March quarter as the property industry ramped up its digital spending.
Source: IAB Australia.
The latest IAB/PWC Online Advertising Expenditure report showed real estate had increased its category share of general display online advertising by 1.9% in the March quarter, to hit 10.4% sitting in third place.
The report said this result represents the highest retail category share for real estate since the data collection began in 2008.
Motor vehicles (20.7%) and finance (10.7%) topped real estate in the online ad spend.
Around 30% of the overall advertising pie is spent on digital, with the overall online advertising market growing 17.1% year on year to $1.067 billion. Digital's 30% is ahead of both free to air television and newspapers.
However, overall online advertising dollars fell in the March quarter by 1.9% compared to the previous December quarter.
"The March quarter is always slightly softer than the strong December quarter, however, it was pleasing to see strong year on year results," explains IAB director of research, GaiLeRoy.
Search and directories accounts for the biggest portion of online advertising at 54%, with general display with 28%, and classifieds at 17%.
Mobile advertising made up 15% of total online advertising expenditure, compared to 14% in the December quarter.
Video advertising had year-on-year growth of 55 percent, and represented 14 percent of digital display dollars for the quarter. Classifieds grew by 4.4 percent since March, 2013.