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You really can’t have the perfect real estate marketing mix without making social media a strong part of your online presence. And that means you’ll have to consider each of the top channels.
Twitter is considered by many real estate pros as the social network to use for branding purposes only, but Twitter has evolved greatly in the past few years. In addition to tweets and accounts showing up in Google (the channel is now linked to SEO success), Twitter also offers targeted advertising, all kinds of multimedia sharing options, and the ability to engage with your audience directly — meaning it can be a beneficial real estate lead generation resource too.
Master the art of tweeting to enhance your brand awareness.
With Facebook constantly changing its News Feed algorithm (a headache for brands who try to get their content found by the right people) and Instagram denying businesses the ability to share links in their posts (not ideal when many companies have promotions running on the social network), Twitter stands out from the pack, in that it allows professionals in seemingly all fields to effectively share their online content and target their niche audience.
Having said that, it still takes a substantial amount of effort to craft 140-character tweets that:
- resonate with your core demographic (buyers, sellers, and/or renters)
- inform those in your housing market about your agency
- help you and your firm’s real estate lead generation goals
The first step to improving your tweeting is to … well … start tweeting. It may sound obvious, but experience is the name of the game here. List out all of the content on your IDX website (e.g. blog posts, buying/selling resources, area/community pages) and develop tweets for those pages.
Once you have those lined up for your social sharing queue (more on that below) for the long run, you can focus on the other half of your tweeting strategy: sharing photos and videos of your listings, providing local market updates, retweeting relevant tweets (e.g. local real estate reports, info about area events), and anything else your audience wants to learn (more) about.
Boost brand exposure by sharing listings and resources.
At the end of the day, Twitter is all about volume: The more tweets you send that feature rich information about your business — and that can help you generate real estate leads — the better your social strategy will be. This means you need to send out no fewer than 10 tweets daily that promote your brand (e.g. new listings you represent, open houses you’ll host, listing presentation offers) along with even more retweets and likes of others in your market to broaden your branding.
As with any other social network, though, you don’t want to be entirely and overtly promotional of your agency. So, for every site page you share on Twitter, try to connect with another user in some way. This could be:
- a quick and easy “@” mention of another user you follow (industry peers nearby, local business owners — anyone in your existing network)
- more in-depth interactions with those you don’t know but want to earn follows from (for instance, journalists at the local paper or bloggers who write about your community — people you can develop relationships with to enhance your branding).
Identify local people and brands to connect with on Twitter.
The best way to pinpoint these aforementioned individuals is to learn everything possible about your area — including and especially who the influencers are — and finding unique, simple ways to connect with them. For example, chat up local reporters at the news station to let them know about special events you or your firm are hosting soon, or ask nearby residents you randomly connect with questions related to their tweets (e.g. ask someone who tweets about restaurants a lot which ones you should try next).
Not everyone will be willing to engage back with you on Twitter, but spending 15 minutes a day chatting up people and brands in your market is an optimal way to become more recognizable in your community and, assuming your tweet schedule is optimized and automated accordingly, earn more clicks to your IDX website. Speaking of which …
Set yourself up for success with a social sharing schedule.
You may have heard of this thing called “marketing automation” in the past few years. It may sound complicated, but in actuality, it’s one of the easiest, most effective tools real estate agents can use to improve their lead generation, nurturing, and conversion goals.
To succeed with this software, though, you need to find the right option for your brand first, so test out a handful of the myriad options available to you and see which is best for your particular needs. Then, turn to spreadsheets to organize a tweet schedule you can stick to weekly. This schedule should and will change over time, as you see which tweet frequency and times are best (i.e. most clicks to links in these shares). But once you have one in place, you’re on your way to Twitter success.
