Growing Your Twitter Followers
If you were to ask me if Twitter is one of my favorite social media outlets, I'd say no. But it does work for quite a few agents. So I decided to work on it for a couple of months to see what the best way to grow on it was. And the results were pretty similar to what I did with Instagram. The biggest growth comes from the time you invest to engage with a local audience. Take a look at my top ways to grow your Twitter followers below:
BECOME A FREQUENT TWEETER
Does "tweeter" sound as weird of a word to anyone else as it does to me? Okay, back on topic. You can't expect many people to follow your Twitter page if they don't have a clue as to what you do and what your page will be about. If they see real estate, unfortunately we get thrown into this collective idea of spam by consumers, so we need to fight that. You need to show your potential audience that you aren't planning on spamming them, but instead posting things that actually connect with them on a personal level. Make sure all of your posts are related to local content and are niche related.
The good thing about Twitter is that you can post much more frequently on it then you would on Facebook. I would recommend at least 3-5 tweets a day, spread throughout the day - not all at once. And if you've kept up with other modules (hope so!) then you'd have a strong idea as to what to post about so your niche wants to follow your page. Now, to make your posts effective, you'll need to add hashtags. The hashtags help you get found by people in your area so they can see your tweet and decide if they want to follow you or not.
What hashtags should I use, Linda? You might be asking yourself. Good question! Don't use a lot of hashtags like real estate, Realtor, real estate agent, etc. People in your community aren't going to be searching for those tags. It's not what interests them, at least not on Twitter of all places. You know what hashtags like that get you? Lots of other agents who see your content. And that's not your market. So use relevant hashtags to your city and niche. Like for me, I would use #Nashville #MusicCity #Predators #Titans - local content for a community based page. Now if I wanted a niche for that, I would add additional hashtags to match it. If you can, check out trending hashtags and see if you can use one of them in a relevant post on your twitter to reach a broader audience. Make sure you use images and use blog posts related to your community/niche to have a visually attactive feed as well.
YOUR CHARM IS IN THE ENGAGEMENT
Don't just sit around for people to come and like your stuff. Make sure you're going out of your way to create engagement and relationship building with folks in your area. We tend to forget the first word in social media, and that's "social." So don't be shy about being social! Search by relevant hashtags in your community and see who is posting in your area. Spend 5-10 minutes on a daily basis engaging by liking tweets, re-tweeting, or even following others in your local community. Of course the time you invest into the engagement, the faster your following will grow. The more people I engaged with, the faster my following grew. Don't wait around for people in your community to notice you, go out there and make yourself noticed. And by go out there, I mean prop your feet up in your favorite pajamas and get those fingers busy on social media.
PROMOTE YOURSELF, DARLING
Now if you've decided to make Twitter a big part of your social media network, don't forget to promote yourself. Add your twitter handle to just about anything you can think of: websites, business cards, other social media accounts, flyers, etc. Don't spam people, but don't be shy to ask people to follow you on your twitter. Be sure you're only promoting yourself to an audience that makes sense, as in they can actually turn into buyers and sellers, do not promote yourself to other agents or people that live in a different country. Doesn't really make sense to invest that much time and energy when our businesses are so localized.