Twitter can be a great tool for real estate agents, provided you decide exactly what you want to do. It’s so tempting just to start tweeting, but that’s a strategy that won’t work. Instead, you need to figure out who you’re trying to reach and what will serve them.
This is your most important marketing question for twitter and every other bit of marketing you do.
Are you working mostly with buyers or sellers? What neighborhood(s) are you working or farming? What makes you special? Another way to ask this is why should someone choose you as their real estate agent?
The reason you need to know this is because you can then hone your tweets to appeal to your specific audience. Perhaps, if you’re dealing with buyers, you’ll find articles helpful for them. If you farm a neighborhood you can tweet about information there. You get the idea.
Tweeting doesn’t take much time, but there is a bit of challenge to get your message to 140 characters or less. On the other hand, no one is more interested in your business than you are, even the person you outsource to.
My suggestion is you get familiar enough with twitter form so you can tweet once a day or so in practically no time.
If all you every tweet is news about what you’re doing, people will lose interest in following you.
On the other hand, if you tweet from the place of being of service to your clients and potential clients your audience will love you.
When, for instance, you find an article or write one that would benefit your audience and you tweet the link to it, you’re being of service. News can also be of service. News of hte neighborhood, including school news, service club info and the like.
Of course, you want to tweet your own open houses and about the good, and helpful, stuff you add to your website. That’s news too.
You’ll find recommendations for what percentage of tweets should be straight marketing posts and what percentage should be interesting, helpful, etc. My own feeling is that you can make all your tweets helpful and interesting to your audience and that is the best way to market yourself on twitter.
Hashtags are those terms preceded by the hash or number sign (capitol 3 on your keyboard). These tags are a way to categorize twitter posts by keywords others are looking for. You want to learn to use them well because that’s how people will find your tweets.
RiteTag has an evolving list of real estate hashtags you can start with; you can google for real estate hashtags and you can refine that search by adding your area or specific real estate market.
Are you making use of twitter in your real estate business? Tell us about it, or ask a question in comments.
Before Anne Wayman became a writer she sold real estate in Southern California. She worked with her father who learned the business from his father. Not surprisingly she learned a few things along the way. Since then, she has been freelance writing for over 30 years – she is a grandmother, loves cats and writes about a wide variety of topics including real estate.
