Twitter for real estate professionals is an under-appreciated platform when it comes to business development. While Twitter alone can not – and will not – drive your social media/content marketing plan, it is a phenomenal way to build name/face recognition around your geographic farm, and across your city. It’s a valuable tool for personal branding, but won’t necessarily translate to immediate generation of leads and listings.
That’s not to say that it can’t or won’t generate leads and listings ever, rather that patience is required as you build a following.
The reality is that no one platform can do this, it’s a combination of strong content across your platforms in executing your content marketing plan which attracts attention, attention attracts impressions, impressions create followers, and followers – who readily identify your name and face with real estate, and your geographic farm – generate leads and listings. This guide to Twitter for real estate professionals will get you there.
Here are the 6 things you need to be doing to get your Twitter game on point.
1) Create Compelling Content Targeting Home Buyers & Sellers In Your Area
As with all social media, having interesting and memorable content is ESSENTIAL. A strong mix of words, pictures, and – most importantly – video helps people decide to follow you. But here’s what you need to remember: NOT ALL OF YOUR CONTENT HAS TO BE ABOUT REAL ESTATE.
To effectively leverage Twitter for real estate professionals you want to observe The 1/2 Rule: one ‘business’-related tweet for every two ‘fun’ tweets. This helps break up your content so that followers don’t feel you’re all business.
The Three main categories of tweets to focus on:
Business Tweets: Tweets relating to listings, open houses, showings, sales/purchases by clients
Fun Tweets: Tweets relating to literally anything but real estate; general interest/humor.
Local Tweets: Share tweets of local business owners, local news, local deals etc.
Twitter is – by very implication of its format – a platform built for those not interested in reading novels worth of written content. It’s visually based and very much a way to get great visual content out to wide audiences.
What you want is to employ strong photo and video content primarily to ‘grab audiences’ and link them to your site or one of your other social media profiles. Clear, concise and effective wording will augment your content, as we’ll discuss in the next point.
2) Master 140 Characters
The brevity of 140 characters is both a blessing and a curse. If you’re a strong writer, you’re actually at a disadvantage as many strong writers find it difficult to convey meaning in such a small amount of space. Theoretically, you’re trying to convey a message, provide a link AND two hashtags into 140 characters or less, and a compressed link is about 10-12 characters.
Twitter is about getting right to the point. No exposition, no drama, no circumstance – just pure information in all its naked glory. Albert Einstein once said if you can’t explain something in 90 seconds, you don’t understand it well enough. The same can be said about a tweet: if you can’t explain it in <140 characters, you probably don’t understand what you’re trying to say.
Imagine a tweet as furnishing a small studio apartment. If it occupies floor space, it has to serve at least ONE vital function. This is the essence of Twitter for real estate professionals.
Let’s say you’re tweeting about an open house in Toronto’s Liberty Village:
#OpenHouse in #LibertyVillage on 6/17! Free food, sweet #condo! Hope to see you there! (CONDENSED LINK) #Toronto #RealEstate
The key is to use hashtags strategically throughout a tweet to best utilize the space allotted. While you’ll hear people recommend that you should limit yourself to two hashtags, in the case of promoting an event like an open house, the more (APPLICABLE) hashtags, the better. That leads into the next essential point in Twitter for real estate professionals: hashtagging.
3) Hashtagging
Unlike Instagram, there is a more subtle and nuanced way to use hashtags than just blasting out as many as you can think of. You need to do some homework to determine the most popular (frequently used) hashtags applicable to your neighborhood and city if you want maximum benefit from Twitter for real estate professionals.
While Twitter will offer you broader suggestions as to what is trending across Twitter, you should try a program like RiteTag which will offer suggestions based on keywords. While they offer a mobile app solution, using the browser extension is a great way to get the most out of your content planning on social media software like Hootsuite.
For other hashtag analytics solutions, check out this article.
4) Follow and Subscribe to Lists – a MUST LEARN on Twitter for real estate professionals
A lesser known feature – and one that is pure money on Twitter for real estate professionals – is the ability to subscribe to lists of accounts which focus on specific interests by keywords. This is great for people who prefer to filter out the noise and want to just get content related to their specific interests. This is a great way to connect with your target audience and be seen in a much, much, much smaller pond than the Sea of Twitter.
This is also a great way to do secondary hashtag research and find hashtags with a less broad appeal which still perform well among your target audience. For more on how to best employ the use of Twitter Lists, check out this article.
5) Surveys/Contests
You HAVE to engage with your audience if you want to fully benefit from Twitter as a real estate professional if you want to keep them interested, as well as build a new audience. This is a reality for everyone, whether you’re a real estate professional, a dog walker, a small bakery or a speech therapist (basically any non-celebrity profession) – your audience won’t grow if you aren’t putting out content and engaging with people regularly!
Some great ways to do this are using Twitter’s poll function. Asking your audience (and other audiences) questions helps you guide your content plans, learn more about who follows you, and have fun in the process. It also boosts your engagements/engagement rates.
And everybody loves a good contest! Run monthly contests for your followers to give away for prizes you can get by partnering with local businesses. That’s the benefit of Twitter for real estate professionals, you can come up with a great contest and earn followers, or a fun survey which will help you shape your content marketing plan in your evaluation phase!
6) Go Fishing
This is the practice of engaging with Twitter users during high-volume times specifically to get impressions, profile views and followers; it’s a great way to boost your impressions, engagement rate, and follower base, and is an essential practice on Twitter for real estate professionals.
What this requires is attention and focus, because this is where timing and strategy are everything. What you need is a high-visibility event (sporting event, awards program, reality tv show, et cetera) which is trending on Twitter, and to be ready to respond to things that happen in the event.
The point isn’t to create original tweets, the point is to REPLY to tweets from high-visibility accounts as quickly after they tweet as possible with something short, funny/pertinent/heartfelt, and accompany with a strong visual and a few hashtags associated with the event. Look at this example:
This small niche account associated with a hockey trainer with a modest following actively does this, and this is a great example of how accounts with smaller following can grab a large audience.
Famous director Kevin Smith was tweeting during a game of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
This poster replied to the tweet within 2 minutes of it being tweeted using a GIF featuring Kevin Smith’s famous characters Jay and Silent Bob. Smith not only retweeted it, it stayed as the top tweet on his timeline for over an hour – visible to all of his 3.2 MILLION followers.
6) Twitter Analytics For Your Real Estate Profile
If you read the guide on how to create a content marketing strategy for social media, you’ll remember that one of the final steps was KPI (Key Performance Indicators). This is where you evaluate the effectiveness of your tweets.
Here’s how the Analytics for the Tweet example above looked:
The most important metrics to observe are:
Tweets: Number of Tweets sent in a specific timeframe.
Tweet Impressions: Number of times your tweets were viewed in a specific timeframe.
Profile Visits: Number of times people visited your profiles from your tweets.
Mentions: Number of times other users mentioned you in their tweets.
New Followers: Net number of new followers you add over a month.
Engagements: Number of times people clicked any part of your tweet (profile click, media views, expanding views, retweets, likes, avatar, username, hashtags)
Engagement Rate: Number of engagements divided by the number of impressions.
Tying it All Together
Twitter is a unique challenge due to the limiting of characters per post, but it’s worth getting used to because it will force you to become a more concise poster across all forms of social media – which is never a bad thing in the time warp that is social media. To your audience, remember: seconds feel like minutes, and minutes feel like hours. Being clear and to the point will help you across all of your platforms.
Twitter won’t be your ‘catch-all’ platform like Facebook; use Twitter to boost your open houses, to spread your content to various applicable lists, and to fish for new followers. Spending an hour a week, plus fishing time, is about all you’ll need to get the results you want to see to boost your social media visibility, and that will help your content marketing strategy gain traction faster! Follow the advice in this guide on Twitter for real estate professionals and you’ll be generating leads and getting listings from your content marketing plan in no time!
Summary Of Things To Do On Your Real Estate Twitter Profile
1. Create Compelling Content.
2. Master 140 Characters.
3. Do Your Hashtagging Homework.
4. Follow and Subscribe to Lists.
5. Go Fishing!
6. Keep Track of Your Analytics.