Randy Eagar, CRS

Twitter can be a very effective tool for you, but you have to do it the right way. If you make every post about real estate you may be seen as boring or a spammer, but with too few tweets about real estate your followers may not think of you when looking for a broker. Your tweets need to show who you are; your personality, interests, and blend your personal with your business life. Unknown to most, Twitter is also a great for real estate SEO purposes because you can include links to your real estate website or blog, driving more traffic there.
Many people are skeptical about using Twitter for business. “Isn’t it just a bunch of people sending out nonsense like ‘I’m going out for a cup of coffee’ or ‘I think I’ll take a nap now?’” No! There’s plenty of that with the people who are tweeting with just their friends. However, you choose who to follow. Business people who are savvy about getting and keeping a following, post relevant stuff — interesting, leading-edge, up-to-the-minute sorts of things that people with the same interests want to know.
Here are some useful ways to use Twitter for your real estate business. There are many more, so feel free to add some of your own!
1. Converse with People About Your Real Estate Business
a. On occasion, you can tweet positive news about your company and what news is happening. Be careful about doing this too much in that people get tired of self promoting tweets and will tend to delete you.

b. You can see what people really think about you. Twitter is where people are. They are freely expressing their opinion. You can use the search feature on twitter to see what people are talking about each topic. You can write your own name and see what people are talking about you. Whether they are talking good stuff, or bad stuff. It is better than those customer evaluation sheets. So you never get the neutral view out of it. You either read reviews that are super good or super bad. This shows you the general view about yourself, or a product that you are looking for.

2. Write About Events You’d Like To Invite Others
a. Once you’ve established a good database of followers you can send out invitations to events that you’d like others to come to such as Open Houses.

b. Because Twitter sends out your “tweets” to everyone, any event you wish to hold can be broadcast to all following you.

c. With Twitter, you can also send out “Direct Messages” which go to only those that you choose. The one caveat here is that the person that you send a “Direct Message” to (like email) must be a person who is following you.

3. Share Breaking News and Keep Up With Others
a. One of the most important ways of getting your tweets read is to keep coming up with breaking news. Just as bringing to your audience

b. No matter what you are trying to keep up with, twitter has the latest info of it. From technology to breaking news, you can find it all on twitter.

c. Twitter has broken many major news stories ahead of the major networks. You can follow the web trends, news, special sites, and more by being on twitter. As a webmaster, or just as a normal person, you don’t want to fall behind. So to keep up you should join twitter.

d. Many times as a news story breaks, or as great listing come available, others will “retweet” the post using the “Retweet”, or “RT” such as RT @randyeagar has a great new listing in Camino Park.

4. Have A Quote Of The Day
a. Everyone likes to hear and read inspirational quotes.

b. Many who tweet regularly will use quotes when they can’t think of anything else to say.

c. Let’s say that you like to store your quotes so that others can see them during any given period of time. By having them on your Profile, others can see them, but only if they are following you, which you would have to have approved.

d. By the same token, if you are looking for a quote by a certain author, many times you can find it by doing a Twitter search.

5. Interact With Realtors From Other Parts Of The Country.
a. They can be a great source of referrals. As more and more agents get onto the Twitter highway, you will be developing more of a database to cull more referrals.

b. A great way to do this is to be the expert in your field and post often, giving valuable advice. You never know where you next referral will come from.

c. Referrals are the name of the game for many agents, and Twitter couldn’t be any better as a referral tool. Simply “tweet” the fact that you have a client moving to a certain location and ask for agents who service that area. Watch how fast you get deluged with replies.

d. The same thing goes for watching for referrals as well. I just did a search for “real estate referrals” and there were pages and pages of them. Now all you have to do is be more specific by adding in your location.

6. Use Twitpic To Share Photos Of Your New Listings.
a. Twitpic is a website that allows users to easily post pictures to the Twitter microblogging and social media service. Twitpic is often used by agents to upload and distribute pictures or in near real-time as an event is taking place. Twitpic could be used independently of Twitter, in a way similar to Flickr. However several characteristics make this site a companion for Twitter. Twitpic usernames and passwords are the same as the ones in Twitter. Comments to photographs are sent as a reply tweet. Twitpic URLs are already short, making it unnecessary to use URL shortening.

Randy Eagar, CRS
WebsTarget SEO
www.WebsTarget.com
Randy@WebsTarget.com