The basics of social media engagement

 

Twitter recently celebrated 5 years of service. In those 5 years Twitter has gone from being unknown to something that is regularly quoted in mainstream media. This doesn’t help that Estate Agents continue to repeat this following phrase…

“I don’t get twitter”

You know what, there’s nothing to get about twitter.

Twitter is simply a tool for communication. Estate Agents can use it to promote properties and their services or distribute links to articles on property, but twitter will always be about people.

A term that is frequently bandied about by the social media industry, but engagement is important if you are going to incorporate it into your online strategy to drive more traffic to your Estate Agent website.

There are generally two main ways that you can end up regularly engaging with a loyal follower -offline and online.

Firstly one of the easiest ways for Estate Agents to gain loyal followers is to bring their twitter profile into the offline world. Tell people you are on twitter and follow local users that you come into contact with. Estate Agents will then find that they slowly build a local online community.

Engaging with people via twitter is just as easy as engaging them offline although it still requires some effort.

Estate Agents must either contact them or they must provide interesting enough tweets that people feel compelled to contact them. Creating tweets that people will want to retweet, click on a link or reply is not the easy task, but will be worth the effort.

Contacting twitter users in the local area is easy through twitter’s search feature. Estate Agents can either use twitter’s advanced search function or just simply search for local events. One slightly sneaky way is to look at what your competitors have been listed under. If they’re under a list named after your area, you’ll know that it’ll be a good source of local twitter users.

James Coyne eMarketing and Social Media Consultant