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Remember, meaningful engagement starts with understanding your target audience.
Twitter is a dynamic platform for marketing your brand and forging new relationships—as long as you use it thoughtfully. In fact, if you’re not successfully engaging with followers, you may be doing more harm than good. Make the most of this social site by avoiding these three missteps.
1. Set it and forget it.
Scheduling tweets ahead of time and setting up automated posts (such as promoting new blog articles) can save a lot of time. Your job isn’t to sit on Twitter all day; it’s to do the tremendous job of running a real estate business. However, if you never add the human touch to your tweets, it could cost you followers. The point of being on Twitter is engagement, and in order to do that, a live person has to respond to tweets and direct messages and comment on the tweets of followers. Adding a personal inflection lets people know you’re not some robot manning an account on autopilot. You’re a real person behind the brand, with a life and hobbies that potential clients can relate to.
2. Not tracking analytics.
Don’t tweet in vain. Find out which tweets are getting the most traction, and know what time of day your tweets perform best and what links are driving traffic back to your site. Twitter has a handy analytics tool to help track the performance of your content and links. You can easily find your most popular tweet of the month, mention, media share (photo or video), and followers who show you the most love. Break your tweets down by their engagement rate, impressions, day, and time of performance. Or take a close look at your audience to see who’s following you based on their interests, gender, occupation, income, consumer buying styles, or even their wireless carrier. You’ll learn so much more about your followers (current and potential clients) and what they want to see from you. For a deeper dive, use a third-party analytics source like HootSuite, which also is great for scheduling posts. Spredfast can help larger companies with multiple social media managers who are publishing to various Twitter accounts.
3. Talking but not listening.
Twitter should not be treated solely as your marketing megaphone. You might annoy or isolate your target audience by talking business without a clear understanding of what people need or want. Try “listening” by using Twitter’s search tool, looking up keywords and hashtags to find out what people are saying about real estate in your market or niche. Create lists on Twitter of influential people you follow whose tweets you don’t want to miss. Examples of lists could be clients (past or future), local government officials or agencies, local business owners, or other real estate experts.