If you’re already chomping on social media daily for your real estate business, then you’re no doubt familiar with services like Bit.ly that shorten your web link addresses and offer tracking so you get some insight about what your followers click on and what they tend to ignore.

Bit.ly just released a new feature called Bundle that enables users to take a bunch of links, bundle them together into one link and share with your social network.

This is a useful service for real estate agents who want to offer value to their followers by showing them important and related news items. You’d like to share a number of items and give them some context, but you may not have the time or inkling to write blog posts about them.

Let’s use the recent news about robo-signing as an example. Say you see a number of news stories about this issue. You can log on to Bit.ly, gather up several of the best stories on this one topic and enter each link into the app for shortened links. Then you click “Bundle” and one link will be produced points to a page each of the links you gathered are assembled. At that point, you can even enter comments under each item, change titles and rearrange items.

The benefits of bundling links like this are:

• Bit.ly’s service tracks everything so you will see how many clicks each link gets. This helps to assess whether the info you’re linking and sharing is useful or of interest to your followers.
• By bundling links, you can offer your followers more context to the story than simply throwing out one link on an issue.
• By adding your own comments to links in the bundle, you also offer more context to a story than a standalone link could give. There’s simply not enough space within Twitter’s 140-character limit to add this sort of context to a single link.

Buying and selling homes is often a confusing and frustrating process for the consumer.  They have questions for their agents – lots of them in fact. News about the market, new housing policies and changes in the finance system can add to this confusion. If you’re into blogging, these may all be issues that you cover in your blog. But if you’re not as prolific and still have insight and something to say, Bit.ly Bundle gives you a new way to do this.

Remember: succeeding with social networking comes down to how much value you add to the conversation. Anybody can copy a link into Twitter. But add a little more effort and context and you could stand out from the herd.