Use These Killer Social Media Marketing...

In another recent lesson, we covered some tips to use via Facebook that’ll help with marketing for real estate investors. Now we want to cover some good tips for Twitter.

These days it seems really challenging to grow a business well without using social media.

We can’t cover all the great things you can do with either one of these social media platforms in just a lesson or two... But we can cover some tips that have really helped other investors grow their businesses. If you want to learn the basics of Twitter, there is a great beginner’s guide over at Mashable.

How to Win Tweets and Influence Followers

What if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it? Same with Twitter. You could have the best tweet in the world, but if nobody sees it, does it help?

Nope.

Same as the rest of social media, you want to get your message out there. That means followers. How do you get followers? Here are 10 ideas:

Follow other people and hope they add you back – but this can take a lot of time. Don’t make it your only strategy.
Run competitions for people who follow you, tweet about you or get others to follow you as well.
Offer rewards ($500 off your wholesale commission for example) if someone brings in another 10 or 20 followers.
Add Twitter feeds everywhere you can – such as your website, blog, every email you send out and your other social media profiles.
Encourage people to retweet your links. That means putting a lot of value in your tweets, too. Help other people and they will help you.
Bring your Twitter account with you when you leave the computer. Put it on business cards, bandit signs, slide presentations and other advertising. Also bring it up when you talk to people.
Learn from others. Go to Twitaholic and see what the Top 100 Twitter people are tweeting. Then use those trending topics in some of your tweets to get more interest.
See the topics that are trending on Twitter by going to search.twitter.com and incorporate those into your tweets.
Get some feedback. Qwitter can tell you if someone ‘un-follows’ you after a tweet (so you know not to send something like that out again). Twitter Counter can keep track of how many users you are adding per day.
Use Twitter’s Advanced Search function. When you pull it up, you will see something like the picture below. You can see who is tweeting about certain neighborhoods, problems in their lives (motivated sellers) or topics in real estate that might be good to retweet to your buyer’s list.

Optimizing Your Twitter Account

In addition to going out into the real and virtual worlds to find followers, it’s important to have those followers stay once they find your account. You want your buyer’s list to keep buying from you, and others to recommend you to motivated sellers.

Here are some ideas for making your account more customer-friendly:

Fill out your bio thoroughly and put a picture. People are much more interested in following you if they have an idea of who you are.
When you send out Tweets, don’t use the full 140 characters. If people want to retweet you and make a quick comment, they will need some of those characters. Also, shortening your tweet will make the links work better.
Use Bit.ly or Ow.ly to shorten your links on your tweets and give you more characters to write. Both products give you feedback on how your tweets are performing but Bit.ly can also give you a QR code for each link. The QR code is handy for mobile-device scanning.
Content! Content! Content! Give your followers what they want. Let them know about tips and techniques you have found that made you money in real estate. Give away information for free.
Analyze Twitter trends. You can start with your homepage, which shows popular topics that you can sort by location. See what people are talking about in your ‘farm’ area, for example. If you really want to get into ‘Hash Tag Analytics,’ you can head over to Hashtags.org and dissect how your hashtags and others are doing. It will cost you though.
Use pictures and videos with your tweets. This is a very visual age. People don’t read like they used to.
Share good content with your audience. Even if it is your competition. If they have a good article or tip, it shows that you care more about your followers than yourself.

When you boil it all down, social media has many of the same attributes as any other kinds of advertising. Providing value for people and engaging them never goes out of style.

Sure there are lots of tricks to improve your account. But, ultimately the goal is to have ‘raving fans.’ The way you do that is to cater to them.

Tweet Tips?

If you have other Twitter tips and techniques, please share them with other members in the comments section below.

Provide Value – Whatever you do in your business, don’t take advantage of people. Let them know you care about them. It will pay you back in spades.

Use Social Media – It’s what all the cool kids are doing (because it works).

Stay Up to Date – On as much as you can in real estate. People are coming up with new creative ways to do things all the time. And they will often share the techniques on the web – like at Real Estate Mogul. Take time to see what others have for content.