How to Show Your Cards on Twitter.
Twitter has around 255 million active users, according to the company’s latest quarterly report, and despite reports that the social network’s numbers are declining, its widespread use means it acts as a fantastic way for businesses to directly communicate with prospects and clients.
It started out as a great place to create, discover and share ideas, and has grown into a very sophisticated relationship building and relationship maintenance tool; the most obvious real estate business use of Twitter is to meet potential clients the same way you would at networking event or property tradeshow.
However, you can also use it to:
- Develop and promote your real estate brand
- Interact with your customers
- Track what people are saying about your company
- Create buzz around events or open houses
- Help individual employees act as liaisons to the public
- Promote listings and other content such as blog posts
Now you know why you need a Twitter account let’s get started on how:
Step 1: Select Your Twitter Handle
To setup your Twitter account you will need to select a username (otherwise known as a Twitter handle)
The key to selecting your username is to keep it simple and relevant. If you’re representing an agency or brokerage use the company name in your twitter handle (Propertyshowrooms). Or if you specialize in a particular area include the location in your handle (LondonRealtor).
It also helps to try and keep some consistency with your other social accounts so that prospects can easily identify you, for example if your Facebook account is /sophierealtor then make your Twitter username the same.
Step 2: Find People Already on Twitter to Follow
One of the most important things you will need to do on Twitter, especially during your first few months of using it, will be to follow and listen to people who have been using it for some time and have established some authority for the industry they represent. For example, a good person to follow for real estate marketing might be someone like Josh Cobb (@joshcobb) or us of course (@PropAdvertising or @Prop_search) or follow some big real estate agencies or a few of your competitors and watch what they’re doing online.
The key is to follow people that genuinely interest you. If you get into the habit of following people just because they are popular, then you may find your Twitter stream inundated with posts that aren’t relevant to you and your business. So be selective about who you follow and again keep it RELEVANT.
It’s also worth finding and following friends and colleagues on Twitter in order to start building a referral network.
How to find people to follow:
Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com/):
This free resource—previously called Summize—is a search function that helps you find people who are tweeting about specific words. For example, you can find people who have tweeted about “real estate.” You can also use Twitter Search to see who has tweeted about your company.
Follow People Your Followers are Following:
Once you begin receiving updates from a handful of people, watch to see whom those people chat with using an @reply. If they’re interesting to you follow them too.
Follow Hashtags (#) at Events:
At many events, the organizer will establish a hashtag, (i.e. #MIPIMUK) so anyone tweeting at the event can include the hashtag (#) in their Tweet. Follow those people who are at the same event as you who you may not have met in person yet.
Step 3: Change Your Settings
Twitter does a great job of keeping things very simple for its users, but there are a few things that are not activated by default that I would recommend changing.
Firstly under “Settings”, tick the “Add a location to your tweets” box. This will allow your followers to see where your tweets are coming from and makes your posts more hyper-local.
Secondly make sure you un-tick the “Protect my tweets” box. This is only useful if you do NOT want anyone to see your Twitter updates. I wouldn’t recommend keeping your tweets private as it kind of defeats the object of being on Twitter in the first place.
Step 4: Optimize Your Profile
One of the great things about Twitter is you can do a little bit of optimization to help your profile and tweets get indexed in search engines.
Upload a photo of yourself to your Twitter profile. This will show up when people follow you and it makes your feed much more personal. People are far more inclined to follow someone they can put a face to as opposed to a faceless egg. I would also recommend using your real name and adding your location, this too will help people find and recognize you.
Another great feature is you can use the “Web” field to enter your website’s URL, which is a great way to drive traffic to your website with little to no work.
Finally it really helps to write a concise, relevant and unique bio. You should ideally try to work in some keywords, such as your location, role or niche market.
Step 5: Inject Some Personality
The finishing touches to a great Twitter account are to customize the design of your Twitter page this is so you can keep your branding consistent and maintain awareness throughout all of your online accounts.
You could use one of Twitter’s provided themes or spend a bit extra to have a designer professionally put together a custom Twitter background that matches the branding of your website. Whichever you choose, the key it to match up your design colors (click on CHANGE DESIGN COLORS next to CHANGE BACKGROUND IMAGE) to that of your brand.
How to Use Twitter for Real Estate Marketing
That’s how to get started, now let’s look at how you can use Twitter to market your business and establish authority, build a referral network, communicate with existing clients and find prospects.
Step 1: Listen
If you want to learn how to effectively market yourself on Twitter, then spend some time listening to active users. By “listen” I mean observe, research and understand what effective users do to gain followers and strike up viral conversations.
To get you started here are some statistics on what works for businesses on Twitter from Wowanalytics:
- Tweets from businesses that contain images are 34% more likely to get retweeted than tweets from businesses with no image at all.
- Tweets from businesses with a URL placed in the middle of a tweet are 26% more likely to get retweeted than those with a URL placed at the beginning or end of a tweet.
- Tweets from businesses that include hashtags are 33% more likely to get retweeted than tweets without hashtags.
- Tweets from businesses with one hashtag are 69% more likely to get retweets than those with two hashtags.
- Hashtags with 11 or more characters get 117% more retweets than those within 6 and 10 characters.
- Businesses will on average lose 15% of the new Twitter followers within three weeks unless they make an effort to engage early.
- 57% of businesses are spending at least 50% more on Twitter marketing compared with two years ago, with 15% of respondents stating that their spending has tripled.
Step 2: Update
One of the most important things you need to do with Twitter is to keep it updated. This does not mean that you have to tweet every second of every day. All this means is that you need to consistently post relevant, useful and timely messages to your Twitter account. Even if your updates come once a week, if they are extremely valuable, funny, resourceful or unique then they will be much more effective then someone who just tweets every 5 minutes about irrelevant things.
Try tweeting about:
- Newly acquired listings
- Recently sold listings
- Property price changes
- Community / neighborhood news where most of your listings are
- Tips on best neighborhoods to live in
- Tips on best schools in the area
- Links to property virtual tours, images or listing pages on your website
Step 3: Promote & Advertise
At this point you should start seeing some people follow you and you should be getting a good stream of quality updates from the people you’re following. The next step is to promote your Twitter presence properly. Just as you need to market your website, you must also do so for your Twitter account. Fortunately Twitter, and many other companies, makes it very easy for you to do so. Here are some ways to get people to acknowledge your Twitter presence:
- Add Twitter widgets to your website
- Use your @ Twitter username in all of your communications, especially your email signature
- Get Twitter users, especially those with lots of followers, to retweet some of your best Twitter updates
- Buy sponsored tweets through services like TweetUp,SponsoredTweets and BeTweeted
Twitter also has some great tools and functionality to advertise your business on the social platform.
One of the best solutions for businesses they provide is ads that target users with specific demographics and interests called Twitter Cards. Using Twitter Cards for real estate website will allow a richer sharing experience. Normally when someone Tweets a post or page from a website, you just have a link with a headline or description. By installing Twitter Card coding on your pages and posts, when someone clicks to Tweet your article or listing, an image, summary, product images, gallery and other options, can be included, depending on what Twitter Card layout you choose – meaning your ads are really distinctive and engaging.
Twitter also does a great job of keeping things really simple when it comes to advertising on the social network and starts the process by asking what it is you want to achieve in order to guide you through the best options for your business. You can check out what Twitter advertising options might suit your business here.
Final Note
Engagement is the key to your social success. The golden rule to being successful on Twitter, and all other social networks for that matter, is to realise that they are not meant to be a one way conversation. To get the full potential out of a strong Twitter marketing campaign you MUST create conversations with other people. If you’re just constantly talking AT people and not WITH them, then your Twitter efforts are most likely to go unnoticed. Here are some tips to help you create result producing conversations:
- Ask questions to spark conversations
- Include hash tags (i.e. #realestate) in your tweets so people can easily find and following trending topics
- Include links in the majority of your tweets
- Answer questions that other people are asking. Use Twitter Search to find a topic people are talking about and answer some questions
- Follow people who compliment your expertise and strike up conversations with them
- Retweet interesting / useful posts from other users
There you have it, how to increase brand awareness, and drive business to your real estate website using Twitter.
Look out for Part 4 of this five part series “Gain Ranking Points on Google Plus” coming soon.
Don’t forget to Follow Propertyshowrooms.com on Twitter to make sure you don’t miss out on more social media tips from our team of marketing professionals.
And if you liked this article tweet about it:
Do you have any tips for successfully using Twitter? Let us know in the comments below.
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