Twitter can be a fantastic real estate marketing tool. It’s cost-effective and helps you maintain and build your sphere of influence. If you’re not already using Twitter, check out this guide to get started. If you’re already actively tweeting, read on to learn about four of the most useful tools to improve your Twitter real estate marketing strategy.
Free Tools to Improve Your Twitter Marketing
Finding Influential People
Not all tweeters are equal. Some have huge followings and get lots of retweets. Some don’t. Part of your Twitter strategy should be to engage those who are already influential with your target audience. A couple of retweets from an influencer can really help you grow your following and get your content to a wider audience.
Followerwonk is a great tool to help you find people to follow and interact with. Just search for your target audience, and Followerwonk helps you find the most influential people, along with their stats (like number of followers and tweets).
Finding the Best Time to Tweet
Twitter is a real-time stream of what’s happening right now, not six hours ago, so you should be tweeting when others are listening.
Tweriod is a free tool that figures out when your tweets will get the most exposure. Just sign in with your Twitter account, and it will analyze when your followers tweet to figure out when they’re active. When it’s done, it sends you a report that shows the best times to tweet.
Automating Tweets at the Best Times
Tweeting consistently can be a task in itself. However, with a proper Twitter marketing strategy and some automation tools, Twitter can quickly become as baked into your content development strategy as your blogging efforts.
Buffer is a tool that queues up your tweets and automatically tweets them out according to a schedule. This tool has completely changed the way many people use Twitter. Just sign in with your Twitter account and then set your tweeting schedule using the times that Tweriod recommended.
Queue up all of your messages and Buffer will automatically send them out for you.
The scheduling feature is great, but the best feature of Buffer is that it automatically tracks clicks on the links you tweet out. You can use this to figure out what your followers are really interested in. In this example, it’s obvious that people want to hear about content strategies, and not so much about contaminated cheese.
Tuning Down the Noise
If you’ve been on Twitter for a while, you’ve probably followed a bunch of people who are either generating noise in your feed, or who don’t even tweet at all. Tweepi is a free tool that gives you a spreadsheet-like view of people you’re following, along with the last time they tweeted and whether they’re following you back. You can select a bunch of people and unfollow them right from inside Tweepi.
Get the Most Out of Twitter
Some people still doubt the effectiveness of Twitter as a marketing tool. The majority of those who hold this belief, from what we have seen, are ones that use Twitter to talk AT people. If you fall into this category of those that try to use Twitter to talk at people, then you will most likely see very few results from Twitter. If you’re using Twitter to engage, interact, promote and converse with others, then you will most definitely start seeing the results you want.
The tools described above were developed to make your use of Twitter easier so that you can focus on engagement above all else. Hopefully you find them as useful as we have. If you have other tools that you like better than these tools, then we would love to hear about them in the comments below. Or, if you have questions about how to use these tools for your Twitter real estate marketing strategy, then feel free to leave us a question below.
Last, but most definitely not least, we would like to thank Derek Cheng for his fantastic contributions to this post. Derek is the creator of Impressions Real Estate and the author of a very helpful blog for real estate agents. Follow him on Twitter @impressionsre for more great tips.