There’s been a lot of talk lately about Twitter.  What is it?  How should you use it?  Is it a waste of time?  These are good questions that I want to address.  I’ve been a part of the Twitter community for a few weeks now learning as much as I can about the audience, reach (current and potential) and usefulness of this network as it relates to personal branding and real estate lead generation.

For those who don’t know, Twitter is one of several emerging micro blogging platforms that lets users interact with other members of the network.  Twitter’s power grows as the network grows and last month (Dec. 2008) the company saw 27% growth and logged 4.5 million unique visitors to it’s website.  Those are big numbers and it’s my bet that the tipping point has been reached as we are entering into 2009 and what will be the complete adoption of a very interactive and social web… the masses are coming.

So, how to use Twitter for real estate lead generation.

Most notably, Twitter has eliminated agent-to-buyer and buyer-to-buyer separation.  Because Twitter is a place where people post about the things going on in their life someone who has purchased a product or used a service can share that experience with their Twitter following.  Think word of mouth marketing on steroids.  The clients of yours using Twitter will naturally post about the ups and downs of their transaction.  Their Tweets (Individual Twitter posts) become living and breathing testimonials for your service to anyone in their social sphere.   The potential arises in the ability to leverage the social sphere of happy clients during this social feedback cycle.

“It (The social feedback cycle) is the post-purchase conversation – built up and validated through the collective wisdom of the crowd – that ultimately drives word-of-mouth-based evangelism”  - Dave Evans, Social Media Marketing 

3 steps to leveraging your clients Twitter social sphere.

1. Join Twitter if you haven't already and familiarize yourself with the community.  Take note of the kind of conversations happening on Twitter.
2. Find past and current clients that are using Twitter.  I also recommend installing a service like Tweetdeck to organize the people you are following into groups.  A group of “Past/Current Clients” makes sense.
3. When it is relevant, and especially when there is good news, communicate with your clients through Twitter.  When your happy clients respond back to you then their following (Friends, family, co-workers) will be able read about the favorable experience they are having with you as their agent.  Even better their following may even join in on the conversation.  The fact is that a lot of people will be reading a positive testimonial about your quality service from someone in their social circle.

Twitter is just another piece to your online toolbox as a tech savvy agent.  As these types of micro blogging platforms become the norm, stay ahead of the curve and ahead of the competition.  I already see agents using Twitter successfully and am interested in some more success stories as we move forward!

Additional resources:

Twitter.com – Getting Started

10 Twitter Etiquette Rules

Video: Gary Vaynerchuk – Building Personal Brand within the Social Media Landscape

Lately I’ve been discussing the role of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) strategies in an effective SEO campaign.  For those new to this, PPC generally uses an auction based pricing system for purchasing visits to a website based on specific keywords.  Prices for keywords go up as the number of advertisers goes up because the space available for advertisers is limited.  Paid for links are then shown as “Sponsored Links” along with the organic results in Google searches and advertisers are charged a market price when someone clicks and visits their site.

To make some sense of this the average cost per visit for the keyword “Seattle real estate” is $5.03 or an amazing $100 for 20 visits.  Wow, seems expensive to me but if a website is converting visitors into leads and closings at a rate that produces a positive return on investment, even though that site is probably not maximizing profit, it can make sense especially if work is being done to improve organic rankings in the interim. 

Thinking about it, here are the reasons PPC is appealing…

1. Immediate results.  Start a PPC campaign right now and you can be sending visitors to your site for a specific search term by the end of the day.
2. Easy to calculate return on investment.  At the end of the day marketers and site owners want to be able to crunch the numbers and report their return on investment.  I can understand this and believe this is the biggest reason there is such a large disconnect between PPC vs. search engine optimization (SEO) spending despite the real opportunity that “SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets”.  What effective marketers need to do is weigh the daily ROI decisions against the yearly and long term ROI to make a clear decision.  If it is any indicator, the #1 organically ranked website for “Seattle real estate” has traffic valued at $37,400/month.
3. Keyword testing for SEO. PPC allows sites to bid and drive traffic for specific keywords and then analyze the conversion rates based of those keywords.  Keyword testing is useful to examine if “Seattle real estate” or “Seattle homes for sale” converts visitors into leads and at what percentage.  This can be useful to give direction as to how the best use of resources for managing an SEO campaign can be spent.

And the downside of PPC…

1. Lower conversion rates.  The overall conversion rate or the rate at which searchers take a desired action on a site is higher for unpaid search results than the rate for paid (4.2% vs. 3.6%).  On Google, 72.3 percent of users surveyed felt that organic results were more relevant, while only 27.7 percent rated paid results as more relevant. 
2. Not as many visits for a given keyword.  30 percent of search engine users click on paid listings, leaving 70 percent who are clicking the organic listings or refining their search.
3. Infinite investment required.  Immediate results are a double edged sword, site traffic stops just as abruptly as it starts.  There is a constant infusion of PPC spend needed to maintain traffic levels.

I specialize in finding the very best online marketing strategy for real estate professionals and am very interested in hearing your success and struggles for the benefit of everyone, please share!  Until next time. 

Related posts:

http://www.workingthemagic.com/blog/2008/06/roi-of-seo-vs-ppc.html