As a real estate professional, creating a strong social media presence is an essential part of your overall marketing strategy. Not only does it create visibility, but it can also lend credibility and authenticity to your business, thereby positioning you as the local expert.
As the number of buyers and sellers turning to social media sites for information increases, it is important to identify and understand how to best use social networking tools like Twitter to your advantage. Unfortunately, for many real estate professionals, connecting the dots on how to effectively use Twitter can be a challenge.
So where do you begin and how can you quickly and easily get started with Twitter marketing?
The 6 ways below can help you begin to use this undervalued and underused tool in your real estate business today!
6 Ways to Start Using Twitter in Your Business
1. Claim Your Brand
Your online brand should echo the brand you have established offline. Allow the look and feel to seamlessly blend between your traditional and online marketing by using the same profile picture, design and color scheme throughout. As real estate professional’s, your picture is often the defining mark of your brand. This makes it especially important to transfer the same picture that has graced everything from your business card to listing presentation, to your Twitter profile.
Your online marketing efforts should also match your style. For example, if you are conservative and reserved, stick with a professional or more traditional business photo.
If you have a passion or hobby that defines your life outside of your business, make sure to include that in your profile picture, your bio or both. People want to know the you that exists outside of your real estate career.
Whatever qualities or characteristics make up your personality let them shine through!
2. Choose Your Twitter Tools
Between listing appointments and showings, juggling your day and your duties is no easy task. To make better use of the time you devote to Twitter, try using tools that allow you to listen, respond and interact with your followers.
A few of my favorites are:
- Sprout Social A social media management tool created to help businesses find new customers & grow their social media presence.
- Buffer Analyze and automatically schedule your tweets to post at the best possible time.
- Social Oomph Schedule tweets, track keywords, welcome new followers
- TweetLevel Monitor, analyze and calculate your influence and that of your competitors
[Admin Note: While not a tool per se, check out our hack on how to send a tweet with a clickable image!]
3. Establish Your Goals
Before you begin marketing your business with Twitter, establish your goals. Whether you are interested in gaining the attention of buyers, sellers or top recruits within your area, determining what your specific goals are will offer the clarity needed to properly market your business with Twitter.
To get started, answer each of these questions:
- Who is your target audience?
- What problem can you solve or need can you fulfill?
- What unique outlook can you share that positions your business as thought leader within your local market?
- Will you manage your social media or outsource? If it is you, how much time can you commit on a weekly basis?
- What end results are hoping to achieve? Be specific in what outcome you hope for whether it’s to generate new business or gain new recruits.
4. Determine Your Audience
Far too often I see real estate professionals making the same Twitter marketing mistakes. They decide it is easier to become a “one stop shop,” rather than defining whether consumer or real estate professional is their target audience.
Here is what that might look like.
Amy is a managing broker that wears multiple hats. She finds that in her online marketing efforts, she is torn between her sales orientated, business generating duties and her managerial, recruiting duties. Unfortunately, instead of choosing one group to focus on, Amy decides to serve both. On a daily basis, Amy creates and curates content that is both for the real estate professional, homebuyer and seller. Due to the hodge-podge of content, Amy struggles to find her voice and an audience. Ultimately she decides that Twitter just does not work and gives up on Twitter marketing.
If this scenario sounds familiar, don’t dismay. You still have the opportunity to define your audience and create a community that craves your content.
Before you dive back into Twitter marketing, take some time to determine who your target audience is and what content they are eager to consume. Now work to provide that in a fun and engaging way on a daily basis.
5. Engage and Inspire Your Followers
While running from listing appointment to showings may keep you tied up throughout the day, it cannot be an excuse to simply pop in and out of Twitter on an inconsistent basis.
Create a strategy that includes relevant and newsworthy content along with inspirational and motivational tweets that inspire your followers to get engaged in the conversation. You also want to create share-worthy content that spreads your message, and your brand, across the Twittersphere. This can include invites to your next open house or a link to your latest video explaining the top mistakes made by homebuyers.
Remember, it is important to keep it fresh and mix it up. When creating a content strategy, work to integrate fun and topical with relevant and timely.
Your tweets should consist of:
- Link to your own blog or website content 20%
- Link to other people’s content 20%
- Talk business or share your own marketing material 20%
- The remaining 40% should consist of personal interaction, small talk, commenting and networking
6. Monitor Your Activities
There is nothing worse than sending out a tweet only to find that it fell upon deaf ears. The best way to avoid this situation is to monitor how your tweets are performing. This includes identifying when your audience is actually online.
There are several tools to assist with this including SocialBro and Tweriod. Each will analyze your account and then determine your optimal time to tweet based on the maximum number of followers online at any given time.
Once this is accomplished, schedule your tweets accordingly.
Get Started TODAY!
The idea behind social media is to establish an online presence and create local connections through similar interests. Promoting your real estate business through Twitter can open the door to opportunities never before available, so get out there and start creating those moments today!
Need help with your overall social media strategy? Check out my Social Media Starter Kit for Real Estate Professionals!
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Great article. This was very helpful. I’m going to implement these points and hope I get better results. Thankyou.
Very Informative Article. I really learned a handful lot.
Nice article and yes twitter is also one of the best social media platform to promote real estate brand.
Buffer is very easy to use and very helpful in terms of managing all of your social media accounts. Would like to explore Sprout Social next. Great article btw!
I’ve used Buffer previously and will certainly agree that it is indeed a very helpful tool for managing your social media. Looking forward to trying out the other tools as well. Thanks!
Twitter can be powerful marketing tool if used properly. You can sell any thing using it Real estate , cars , loans etc
Nice info. Thnx for sharing
Hi Rebekah, You’ve outlined helpful tips to leverage an agent’s online presence using Twitter to gain exposure and generate leads. It seems weird to me that there could be realtors that don’t yet have a social presence yet. Given that it’s the most prevalent technology for both communication & advertisement, it seems weird that people would forgo that method. Generally whenever there is something that I’d want to buy, I always go online to check for their reviews. To think that people wouldn’t do this same thing with a purchase as huge as a house is not realistic.
Very Useful Information. Thank You!