Tweet Often

By far one of the most egregious Twitter crimes real estate agents commit is the neglect of their accounts. Tweet at least once a day, and ideally four or more times a day, to actually get anything out of your Twitter account.

Most social media experts say that businesses should limit the number of times they post to their Facebook and Google Plus accounts each day. This is not the case for Twitter; there is no downside to tweeting as much as you want! It is not enough to simply tweet anything that pops into your head, however. Adhere to the tweeting guidelines listed below, or you may sabotage your own Twitter efforts.

Engage Others in the Real Estate Field

Think of the community of people who have accounts on Twitter as a giant party. The people who socialize with others by sharing fun and interesting stories will develop rapport amongst the partygoers. The people who stand in a corner and mutter to themselves will, if anything, drive people away.

Likewise, the Twitter users who actively engage their peers by contributing to the conversation tend to excel. Those who keep to themselves will fail to attract any interest, even if they tweet interesting things.

Focus on Real Estate

Unless you are a celebrity, renowned politician, or athlete, the time you put into Twitter will be most effective if you pick a topic and tweet only about that topic. As a real estate agent, this means that you must tweet about real estate and real estate related topics – and those topics only.

As a real estate professional, you must treat your social media platforms – especially Twitter – with the same air of professionalism you display in person with your clients. While your children, spouse, and weekend plans may be interesting to you, tweeting about them will do nothing but dilute the rapport you have established in Twitter’s real estate community.

The one caveat to this rule is that it is acceptable to occasionally take breaks from tweeting about real estate topics in favor of things like inspirational quotes and appropriate humorous articles, videos, and pictures.

Examples of good tweets by real estate agents:

• “Wall Street Journal reports that US housing market up 7% in December. [link to article] #realestate”
• “US News and World Report finds that Kirkland schools are best in Washington. @usnews #washington #realestate [link to article]”
• “‘If you would thoroughly know anything, teach it to others.’ – Tryon Edwards”

Examples of bad tweets by real estate agents:

• “Going to dinner at the Olive Garden with my hubby tonight! #breadsticks”
• “Picking Daniel up from baseball practice”
• “OMG Snookie is ridiculous”

There are some real estate topics you should avoid, however. Abstain from putting down competitors or constantly touting how good of an agent you are; these tweets will make you look unprofessional and thereby decrease others’ interest in what you have to say.

Share Interesting Content

Posting a boring article on Twitter does not make it exciting. Only share things you know people in the real estate community or your physical community (i.e., the people you will most likely sell homes to) will want to read.

Avoid tweeting about an article, picture, report, business opportunity, etc. if it is:

• Boring.
• Hard to “sell” in the allowed 140 characters.
• Only interesting to a small proportion of the population.
• Hard to understand in less than 10 to 15 seconds.

Do Not Tweet Listings

From houses to clothing, few people turn to social media when they shop online. This is a fact that is lost on a shockingly large proportion of real estate agents who use Twitter. Your primary takeaway from this article should be the following simple rule: Stop tweeting listings!

At its core, tweeting listings amounts to the tweeter trying to make a sale. Twitter users are not interested in having sales pitches clogging up their feeds, so sales-oriented tweets will not be responded to – if they are even read at all. Worse still, your followers will look down on you and your business, thus damaging its reputation amongst people who might have otherwise become your customers.

 
Andy Fulton is a community manager for RealEstate.com. He has more than three years of experience with blogging, outreach, and managing social media accounts for a handful of companies and non-profit organizations in the Seattle area.

Short URL: http://www.thenichereport.com/?p=13582

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