Lasso's Real Estate Technology Blog

Will Home Builders and Developers be a-Twitter in 2010?

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Guy Kawasaki writes one of the most popular blogs in the world and is a leader in social media and online marketing. He has written several books, his latest Reality Check - The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition. (It's worth checking out.)

In a post earlier this year on the Business know-how blog, Janet Attard wrote about Guy's 10 tips for using Twitter. Guy is a huge fan of using Twitter to help spread the word about your business and to help potential evangelists find you.

As many existing new homes builders and developers have already discovered, Twitter is a fantastic way to provide updates and information about new homes projects and communities. As 2009 comes to an end and we begin a new year, your social media marketing strategy should be an important component to your 2010 plan and it may be time to take Twitter to the next level within your company. Check out Guy's tips below:

• Defocus. Don't ignore the A-listers, but don't focus all your attention on getting them to pay attention to you, either. The important thing is "who loves your site" and becomes an evangelist.Twitter is a numbers game, and you need to have lots of followers. You want as many people as possible to find and follow you so they can "send the message up."
  

• Automatically follow everyone who follows you on Twitter. "I think it's arrogant," Kawasaki said, "if you think you are worth following but don't think the people following you are worth following."

• Have a goal for using Twitter and a way to measure how you're doing at achieving that goal. He suggested one good tool for doing that is Retweetist, which shows how many times you've been retweeted. (A retweet is when someone repeats what you said so people they know will see it.)

• Make interesting tweets. Like most other things on the Web, one way to get people to love you is to post information they want to know about.

• Monitor what people are saying about you. You can monitor the tweets about you by searching for your ID, company name, industry segment and by watching @ replies.

• Save time with various social marketing productivity tools. One such tool Kawasaki mentioned is Adjix, which is a Firefox plug that makes it easy to post to Twitter from any place on the Web, and also shows how many times people clicked on your links. Others include Tweetdeck and Twhirl, which both provide ways for individuals to monitor Twitter, and CoTweet, which is a tool for companies that need to coordinate multiple people using Twitter (for instance a support team).

• Copy best practices. On Twitter that means looking at how other companies are effectively using Twitter to engage with their customers and build buzz. JetBlue Airways and Amazondeals were two good examples of Twitter use he mentioned.

• Be willing to "squeeze the trigger" on Twitter. One way of doing that -- one that is somewhat controversial, he suggested -- is to set up searches for things you'd like to get known for, and then automatically tweet a response when that search term comes up in a tweet. The tool he likes for doing that is TwitterHawk, which not only generates the automatic response, it also remembers who the response was sent to so you don't keep spamming them with the same response whenever they mention the topic again.

• Make it easy to share. Add a Share on Twitter button to your Website.

• Be willing to take the heat if you use Twitter as a tool. People will say you are a spammer, that you aren't using it right. And for that, Kawasaki has invented a new acronym: UFM. It stands for UnFollow Me. If you don't like what he is tweeting, he says, just UFM.