2. Twitter for Real Estate
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At this point, everyone is familiar with Twitter. Twitter used to be the second-biggest name in social media with it,
and Facebook, sitting at the top. Over the years, Twitter has mostly been unsuccessful to fully break out and
maintain a leadership role within the social media community from growth and number of users perspective.
However, one area that Twitter does excel at is in the in uencer, thought leadership, and journalism perspectives.
If you're a news junkie or want to know what's happening right now, Twitter is where you go to nd the news, see the
conversation live and become part of that conversation.
With that in mind, there are ways that real estate professionals can use Twitter successfully.
In these next 15 points, we'll walk through how you, as a real estate professional, can do that.
1) Fully set up your Twitter account.
As with any social media platform, you want to make sure that your Twitter account is fully set up before you start
Tweeting and engaging. This means making sure that your website is listed, your location is listed, and you have a full
description, a pro le photo, and a header image. The last thing you want to do is engage with others, and your pro le
looks like you’re a bot or SPAM account because you don't have everything lled out.
2) Make sure your pro le picture is professional.
If you're using Twitter as a personal account for your real estate business (i.e., this is your personal brand), make sure
that you have a professional picture of yourself as your pro le picture. However, if your Twitter is taking on your
company’s persona, make sure you are using your company’s logo instead.
This will help your audience understand whether or not you're a company pro le or an individual pro le. Even if
both of them represent your business, the different ways of setting it up will determine the voice of the account. For
example, if you're an independent insurance broker and this account will be in your voice supporting your business,
make sure you have your picture there as a personal account. However, if your account is going to be posting from
your company’s voice, make sure you have your company’s logo.
3) Make sure your header image re ects your
personality.
The header image is a background image you'll have behind your pro le image. This is a great place to put something
more personal or localized to highlight your business and show your professional personality or your business's
personality. You can change this image around frequently, just don’t leave it as a blank, Twitter default.
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4) Understand what it means to “Follow”
somebody.
Whereas many platforms are more about having original, good pieces of content, Twitter is all about engagement,
particularly your engagement with other users’ content.
Twitter, like most other platforms nowadays, has an algorithm-based feed. This means that it's not going to show all
the content from everyone you follow in chronological order. Instead, it’s going to show you content based on what
you are most likely going to want to see rst in your feed. Therefore, know that just because you follow someone,
you're not always going to see their content.
Think of Twitter as one giant chat room or dinner party conversation. No one likes the person standing in the corner,
just talking to himself. Or every time they get into a conversation, they only talk about themselves and don't engage
with what other people are already saying.
Additionally, understand that when you follow people, they can see who you are following and how many people
follow you. You want to keep a healthy ratio between the number of people you follow and the number of people
who follow you. In most cases, you want to make sure that there are more people following you then who you're
following.
Having a higher number of followers shows that people want to hear from you and read what you have to say. Now,
in the beginning, you will start by having more people you follow than followers. But understand that in the long
run, as you build your audience, you want to keep the number of followers higher than those you are following.
5) Make sure your username matches your name or
your website's URL.
Like other social media platforms, you will want to make sure that your Twitter handle (i.e., your @username) is the
same as your website's URL and other social media usernames.
Twitter has the least number of characters allowed for your username. So, you may need to shorten your Twitter
name from your actual given or business name. If you have to do that, you may also want to purchase the URL for
that shortened username if someone tries to type it directly in to nd your website. Just make sure that after you
purchase that domain name, you forward it to your actual website.
6) Interaction is King.
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When you join Twitter, make sure you are jumping into conversations, talking with people, engaging with them,
retweeting content, and not just pushing out your content to your feed. Provide value in your discussions, provide
value to the people you talk and engage with.
For real estate professionals, this means interacting with both clients as well as other professionals in the eld.
Don’t be the guy who is just trying to hand out business cards/pitch your business to people. Discuss topics with
others like you would during a happy hour.
As mentioned in a previous point, following someone doesn't necessarily mean you're going to see their content. If
you consistently engage with an account’s content, maybe Twitter's algorithm will show it to you more often.
However, that could just as likely not be the case.
7) Twitter is for those with strong opinions.
Some of the best and most successful accounts on Twitter are those with strong opinions.
In today's culture, having a strong opinion can be a plus or a minus, depending on who your audience is. Anyone
with a strong opinion will immediately have people who don't like them because they disagree with them. Therefore,
you will have to be okay with the fact that not everyone will like what you have to say.
The most successful people on Twitter are those that have these strong opinions. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean
a strong political or controversial opinion. This could very much be a strong opinion about what sports team you
like or what type of soda is better, depending on what your brand is and what would be relevant to your brand.
You can have these strong opinions, and that will help attract people who have similar likes and beliefs to follow
you. This is how you can build an online tribe of followers that all share your strong opinions.
If you want to join Twitter and are afraid to have strong opinions, just know you're likely not going to be able to nd
an audience that completely identi es with you. You need to have a strong opinion to engage and get your presence
off the ground.
8) Create “Lists” of people you want to follow their
content.
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To get around this, utilize Twitter’s “List” feature. With Lists, you can create customized groupings of Twitter
accounts that you want to see their content. These Lists could either be public or private and the followed accounts’
content in these lists appears in reverse chronological order (i.e., the most recent post rst). This way, you always see
all the content of the accounts placed in these lists, and not have to rely on Twitter's algorithm to show you the
content. The best part is that you can place accounts in these lists without having to follow them.
You can also use the List feature to give your followers recommendations on who they should follow. For example, if
you're a realtor, you can create different lists consisting of recommendations for local contractors, insurance
brokers, lenders, etc. all within Twitter for your supporters to follow.
9) Jump into hashtag conversations.
As with any social media platform that uses hashtags (i.e., a word with a “#” in front of it like #socialmedia or
#marketing) as a way to group conversations, Twitter allows you to view different Tweets that use the same hashtag
in a single thread.
Since conversation is king on Twitter, you will want to utilize hashtags to nd relevant conversations you can easily
join. Don't be afraid to jump into conversations that you don't know any of the participants. On Twitter, it's
completely acceptable to enter a hashtag-based discussion with people you don’t know. It's a great way to introduce
yourself, and Twitter has a culture where this is acceptable. Just make sure you understand who you're talking to,
what you want to get out of it, and what you want to say (which again goes back to having a strong opinion.)
10) Use relevant hashtags.
Just as you want to jump into hashtag conversations, make sure your tweets have hashtags in them. You don't have
to go overboard, but make sure that your Tweet does include hashtags relevant to the content (and would be
relevant to your followers). This is very important for original, standalone tweets, but less necessary for your replies
to other Tweets.
11) Experiment with how your text appears.
Twitter limits your Tweets to only 280 characters. This is double the number of characters that it allowed initially.
However, it's still very, very short. And if you're replying to somebody or including a link or an image in your Tweet
body, the Twitter handle of the person you’re responding to, the image, and/or the URL all takes up some characters
as well.
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So whenever you're crafting a tweet, play around with how your post appears because one nice thing about Twitter
is that it does allow you to set up your text in multiple lines. Therefore, add emojis and do other things to make sure
your tweets stand out. Don't just have it be one long block of text. Have it appear on multiple lines, add bullet points,
do things so that when someone is scrolling down their Twitter feed, it stands out because it takes up more space
and makes sense to the person who's reading it.
12) Use Twitter “Threads” for longer, continuous
thoughts.
Twitter recently released the ability to create a thread of tweets that contain one long continuous thought. Before
this feature, people had to reply to their tweets and make a notation that this is the “1/10” tweets or the “2/10”
tweets, so on and so forth. They did this to try to make sure that people didn't take any one tweet out of context, but
if you weren’t fast enough, someone else could reply to your tweet and interrupt the thread. Plus, there were issues
with people seeing one tweet taken out of context and not nding the rest of the thread. Threads make it easy so that
you can post your multi-tweet thoughts at one time.
However, you should still make sure that any one tweet can stand on its own. When most people get in trouble with
Twitter is when they tweet something out, particularly part of a larger thought, and one tweet can be taken out of
context on its own.
Even with Twitter Threads, people can still retweet a single tweet within that thread with a comment of their own
and take part in your whole thread out of context. Now, if people dove into that and look at the thread directly
outside of the retweet, they see the entire thing. But know that each tweet can still be separated from the thread.
Make sure there's nothing wrong or nothing that can be agged as inappropriate outside of the main thread.
13) Pay attention to trending topics.
Twitter has a sidebar that customizes trending topics based on your location, interests, and who you follow. What
you want to do is make sure that you pay attention to those, and if a relevant topic is trending, jump into the
conversation because you will likely get an added boost to your tweets because you're joining a broader discussion.
Pay particular attention to trending topics within your expertise, or the things you want to be known for. You can
always jump in trending topics that don't apply to you just to be part of a conversation, but it's still bene cial to
jump in the ones that are dealing with what your expertise is.
14) Post frequently.
Unlike Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, Twitter has the highest capacity for your content. Tweets disappear very
quickly from people’s feed. Therefore, don't be afraid to make frequent posts about topics that you like and engage
with a lot of other accounts’ content.
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15) Repeat posts.
Because Twitter’s content “disappears” quickly, don't be afraid to post the same thing multiple times. Make sure it's
spread out over several days, so if someone ever looked at your feed, it's not the same post again and again and
again. But if you're posting content, and it's relevant, don't be afraid to post it once a week for a couple of weeks, as
long as it doesn't get stale and you have other content and other engagements in between. This is the type of content
you can just schedule out and have it there to ll in the rest of the time with your engagements.
Conclusion:
So in conclusion, Twitter is for real estate professionals who like to talk and have the time to dedicate to the
engagement. If you don't have the time or only would engage once a week or once a month, Twitter might not be the
best platform. Additionally, if you have a strong opinion and like to share that opinion, Twitter would be a great
place. Because the best accounts who do well on Twitter are those with a strong opinion that people can agree with,
disagree with, get in arguments with, etc. If you'd like to talk and want to have a strong opinion, Twitter's going to be
the place for you and your brand.
