Reasons not to have a Twitter feed on your homepage

Twitter has become very popular among estate agents over the last few years. It is generally a great marketing tool to help drive people onto your website, generating leads and encourage real engagement between you and your potential customers.

However with the popularity of Twitter also came Twitter feeds on business owner’s homepages which in most cases is an extreme failure. Of course there are pro’s and con’s to having a Twitter feed on your homepage but in my experience the con’s really do outweigh the pro’s.

Here’s why we would strongly recommend that a Twitter Feed is something you do not include on your homepage:

1. You should be using twitter to drive traffic to your website, not the other way around. With a Twitter Feed on your website you will be driving traffic away and sending them to twitter.

The best way to use Twitter for your business is by writing articles on your own website via your news feed, and then tweeting a ‘catchy headline’ which has a link back to the full article on your site. This will help your optimisation, as all of the contents in the article reside on your website with the keywords being indexed by Google. It also means that you are ultimately driving all traffic to your site, bringing new users that perhaps find you on Twitter first. Once these new users find your site there is a good likelihood of them staying on your site, rather than jumping off to twitter where you could lose them.

2. Your homepage is ‘prime real estate’ and you should be using this space to entice the user, drawing them further into the website (e.g. by using call-to-actions, feature properties, blog posts).

3. Not all of your customers will be on Twitter. Using your ‘prime real estate’ to promote to a small amount of users isn’t worth it and this space on your homepage could be used more effectively to promote yourselves.

4. The things you post on Twitter should already be on your website (within your articles, etc).

5. You shouldn’t be stealing attention away from your blog; having twitter on your homepage will do so.

6. Not posting frequently on Twitter will make you look lazy. Having your customers see 2 week old posts sitting on your homepage untouched looks very unprofessional. This means that if you have a couple of weeks without posting a Tweet, you will be judged negatively.

7. Clutter on your homepage is bad. We would recommend for you to use it wisely in order to generate leads and entice the user into the site and to ultimately contact you. By using a twitter widget, you clutter and dilute the homepage and ultimately if they click on the widget, you lose that potential lead from your site. Don’t clutter your homepage with pointless gimmicks.

It’s important to promote your social channels on your homepage; however this should be done by clearly displaying the social buttons linking through to your social media channels to show users that you are active on those social sites.