Promoting Your Blog and Business with Twitter
2011 was a big year for Twitter as the service continued its move into the psyche of mainstream business. Twitter is rapidly growing in popularity among the commercial real estate industry and quite a community has developed. However, many still dismiss it as silly little service. In my opinion Twitter provides the ability to create exposure for your brand to the largest number of people among all the major social networks. While Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google+ all offer some unique benefits when it comes to creating visibility, Twitter is King.
The disadvantage to Twitter is that it’s busy and noisy and if you are not willing to tweet consistently your posts will often be lost in the crowd. Here a few tips to maximizing your visibility on Twitter.
Use hashtags: Most commercial real estate professionals who use Twitter are well aware of the #CRE hashtag and if you see the moniker then it means the tweets subject matter is somehow related to commercial real estate. This is also how people on Twitter search for information related to a specific keyword or subject.
Tweet Consistently: Tweet daily or at least several times per week and at different times of the day. For Business people during normal business hours are optimum as traffic dies down among business users in the evening. I also suggest using a Twitter management service such as HootSuite or TweetDeck. These services will allow you to schedule tweets at various times of the day. Some people advocate not scheduling tweets and believe you have to be live in order to respond and engage promptly. While I agree you need to be live part of the time, Twitter is primarily a broadcast medium no matter how you try and spin it and you can’t afford to spend hours per day on Twitter.
Don’t Over Promote: People will follow you on Twitter because they find you interesting and like what you do. If you are in business, then why else would you be there. People want and expect to learn about your business on Twitter but people on Twitter despise outright sales pitches, and there’s no faster way to make your twitter initiative ineffective than to hard sell. You have to follow others you find interesting, retweet some of their posts that are informative and engage with people on occasion. I follow a simple rule, I only tweet something with a link to my own content every 5-10 tweets and when I do it is not a hard sell, I am simply sharing one of my blog posts (content marketing) which is by design meant to be informative. If you only tweet about your listings or how many deals you have closed then you will be ignored. There is a famous term in the internet culture for people like this and I am sure you know it.
The Power of Twitter
Twitter is a powerful tool. I have met hundreds of business people and commercial real estate professionals around the country and the world via Twitter. Some have even referred me business. I have been interviewed by journalists and have been featured in various publications, television and radio interviews and even a book, all because people initially discovered me on Twitter.
The Tenant Advisor on Twitter Counter.com
The SEO Factor (Search Engine Optimization)
Social sharing also plays an important role in Google’s algorithm for ranking content on the web. The more your content is shared on the web the better Google rank you will obtain. I am not an SEO expert by any stretch but search engine optimization consultants will all tell you that social plays an important role.
The Scoreboard
Here are the top 25 traffic sources to my blog, The Tenant Advisor for the full year of 2011. Outlined in red are the Twitter related referral sources. As you can see, Google organic search is the primary medium that visitors access my blog. However, out of the big social networks, Twitter is by far the leading source of blog traffic. This is important because my blog serves as the hub of my entire digital marketing strategy. This is where I provide the content that demonstrates my expertise and experience and it is where I want my clients and prospects eyeballs.
In order to better understand the metrics I should explain a few things. If you have ever clicked on link to one of my tweets you will have noticed the engagement bar at the top of the article that I linked in the tweet. The referrals you see in the Google Analytics screenshot above categorized links.visibili.com/referral is attributed to this service. I use links.visibili as a link shortener and it is how I share posts on Twitter and Facebook the vast majority of the time. So the 1,763 referrals you see above from the service is primarily attributed to Facebook and Twitter. While I don’t know the breakdown of whether the referrals came from Twitter or Facebook, my suspicion is a larger percentage came from Twitter since I tweet more than I post on Facebook.
On August 15, Twitter turned on its t.co link wrapper for all links longer than 19 characters. The t.co URL shortener was first announced in June of last year, and it was implemented on Twitter.com this June. As a result the referrals from twitter now show up as t.co/referral with the exception of instances whereby people click on the link to my blog from my twitter profile.The referrals you see from hootsuite.com are when other HootSuite users are clicking on my website/blog link from within my Hootsuite profile.
Just a quick mention about Facebook. You will notice when you add the Facebook.com referrals with the Mobile Facebook referrals and knowing some percentage of the links.visibili referrals are also from Facebook, the number is significant and it dispels the myth that Facebook is not useful for CRE. You might also notice that Facebook referrals spend a longer amount of time on my site.
