Learn how to use Twitter to market your real estate business online. Allan McNabb and his guest Jorge Vazquez show you the basics of using Twitter, while also showing you some incredible tips, such as using Twitter search.

Allan is with Image Building Media and helps businesses in several industries with their internet marketing. Jorge is the CEO of Graystone Investment Group and relies on internet marketing for lead generation, while replying on Image Building Media to provide the internet marketing technology and expertise needed to succeed.

Webinar Cheat Sheet

Here is the cheat sheet we provided the agents who attended the webinar. Although we did not cover all the items during the webinar, we are making all the information available here.

Download the complete PDF of the webinar cheat sheet: Twitter Marketing for Real Estate Professionals.

Topics Cover in the Webinar

Here are the general topics we cover in the webinar:

  • Why Twitter?
  • Determine your Twitter marketing strategy (audience), so you know what to post.
  • Optimize your Twitter profile.
  • Who to follow and engage.
  • Post to Twitter.
  • Use Twitter search.

Image Building Media

Image Building Media is an internet marketing company based in Tampa, Florida, serving clients in various industries throughout the U.S.

We specialize in internet marketing, including SEO, social media marketing, website design, content marketing, video marketing, email marketing, SMS marketing, mobile web marketing, online reputation management, CRM integration, and more. We also provide consulting services, including conversion analytics.

To learn more about Image Building Media and our services, book a free consultation or contact us direct.

Video Transcript

Allan McNabb: Well, hi, welcome, everyone. We appreciate you being here tonight. We have our webinar on Twitter Marketing for Real Estate Professionals, and this is just one more channel. And we’ll be talking about, a little bit about Twitter. If you’ve already downloaded the notes for the webinar tonight, you’ve got a little insight into what we’ll be talking about. And if you would please, go to the Graystone Investment Group Facebook page, you’ll see the live webinar there, and if you would please, share that with your Facebook business page, and we appreciate that very, very much.

All right, so we’re going to start off tonight with Jorge, who has used Twitter for marketing for a very long time, and so we’re very excited he can be with us tonight to share some insights as we get started. So, Jorge, if you can, please, give us some information about Twitter and your experience, and you sort of get us excited about all this, if you can, please.

Graystone’s Success with Twitter

Jorge Vazquez: All right, let me try to get you as excited as I can. No promises, though, [chuckle] no promises. But anyway, to tell you guys a little bit about me, I’m the CEO and broker of Graystone Investment Group. I’ve been in business for 20 years. Oops, I’ve actually didn’t go to school for computer programing… I’m sorry, I didn’t go to school for any type of financing degree or real estate degree. I went to school for computer programming in marketing, back in the days, and Allan knows this. And I fell in love with marketing my company online, the fact of doing SEO very early on. Can you guys hear me? Everything good?

Ray Hendricks: Yep.

Jorge Vazquez: Oh, okay. So I started doing social media very early on. I would say in the early 2000s. And to me, social media, online marketing is very important to be able to take your business to the next level. When it comes to Twitter, I have in my page about 10,000 followers. And one of the things that I could tell you that I like about Twitter the most is that once you have Twitter connected to your email, whether that email is your Gmail or Yahoo or whatever the case might be, any new contact that you’ve been talking to, once they become part of Twitter, Twitter will send you a notification. Why is that so important and why I like that so much is because it’s just another way, another platform that you could be in front of your client, so now you’re interacting with your client via email.

Now you’re interacting, your client is starting to see your updates in Twitter, so it’s just another tool to stay in front of your clients. That’s really why I like Twitter the most. I couldn’t tell you that I’ve picked up a ton of clients from it, but the appreciation that I have with clients comes more on the follow-up side of things, if I’m promoting something, a new concept, a new lending product, a new property, the fact that we could keep my followers updated so quick to Twitter has been one of the biggest advantage of having Twitter for me.

Allan McNabb: Jorge, that’s great, man. We appreciate that, and email just another way to connect, it’s another way to be out there, and it’s another way to bring people to your websites. And a matter of fact, that’s one of the big things to do with it. And so we talked about last time, this concept of omni-channel. It’s not about one thing. It’s not about, well, I do Facebook and I want to make a billion dollars, or I do Instagram, I want to make a billion dollars. But it’s taking all of these small pieces… And a lot of times they’ve got different demographics, and Facebook has its own demographic also. And so you put them all together and they work all together and maybe somebody sees you on Facebook, maybe they see you on Instagram, maybe they see you on Twitter, and they’ve seen you enough and now they’re coming to your website and now they’re in your database, now you market to them, and it’s just one small piece of the puzzle.

Using Twitter for Marketing

Jorge Vazquez: And, Allan, I want to once again elaborate a little more, a little better. The biggest difference between Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, the biggest difference, the one thing that Twitter does that none of the other ones do is that it would notify me the minute one of my connections are in Twitter. You’re not going to get that from Facebook. Facebook doesn’t tell you, “Hey, by the way, that person you met two, three days ago is here, market on them.” You don’t get that from Facebook, neither do you get that from LinkedIn, you don’t get… LinkedIn… It’s not like you log into LinkedIn and it says, “Hey, that connection or that client you talked to two days, they’re here, connect.” But Twitter does that for me. So I could go into Twitter every day and say, “Oh, crap, three other people that I talked to this week are now in Twitter.”

So, I know that moving forward, they going to now see my emails, but they also going to see me in Twitter. So it’s two ways of connecting to that investor. To me, there’s two reasons why you do social media, one is because you want to reach out to as many people as you can, that’s obvious. And the other one is all about perception guys. Why perception? Because I got about 10,000 followers in Twitter, and I could tell you that there’s a greater chance of somebody believing what I’m saying in syndicating because of the amount of followers that I have. So those are the really two things that you do with social media. One, syndicate, try to bring people. The other one is pretend to be… Look the part, look the big part and be able then to get those people to start buying your services or whatever the case might be. But that is to me, Allan, the biggest tool that Twitter has, that I could log in in a daily basis and say, “Oh, crap. One of the investor that I talked to two days ago is now on Twitter, now I got two ways to make sure that I’m staying in front of him and that he’s buying something from me eventually.” [laughter]

Twitter Rewards Engagement

Allan McNabb: Exactly, and you know Twitter is about engagement. Now, we’ve been talking about with Facebook, and with LinkedIn, their algorithms reward engagement. And the same thing is true with Twitter. But, the people who are on Twitter engage probably more than on any other social channel. So somebody is on Twitter, you get a notification in Gmail, you reach out to them, you know that’s probably someone who is wanting to engage. And so you engage them, they’re in your database, they’re getting emails from you. They’re seeing your Tweets, they’re seeing you on LinkedIn, they’re seeing you on Facebook. And in a sense, it is all about perception, and you… It’s like all of us, whenever we are thinking about buying something or doing something, what do we do? We go to check out the website, we go and we look them up on Facebook, maybe Twitter, maybe Instagram, we see if they’re legit or not, and that’s a super big part of it. So, Jorge I know you might have to step out a little bit there, any other thoughts you have there?

Jorge Vazquez: No, if I could share my screen real quick. I would love to share my screen so I could show you guys what I’m talking about. So, here it is, here it is. I just looked at it today, and Brian is following me, but check this out, “Your contact, Mandy is on Twitter.” Boom! So now you check this on a daily basis, now you have two media vehicles to utilize to be in front of this client, your email, and now Twitter. So now you say, “Hey, Mandy. Nice to meet you. Great, we talked two weeks ago, glad you are in Twitter.” This is a really good way of staying in front of each other. The other good thing about Twitter is that spamming, you don’t have to worry about it because the frequency of the ads that come through, the ads come through so fast that there’s no issues of you spamming.

If you send an ad today or a post in the morning, you could send another post in the afternoon, you could send a post later. Your ad could be the freaking new pizza commercial, that is, the pizza ad, new pizza, whatever you cross that you see every freaking five minutes. You could do that with Twitter, and you don’t have that issue. Very different though with Facebook, you have to be more surgical, you have to spend more time. To me Allan, for Facebook and LinkedIn, you require more skills. So let’s say you have a VA posting for you, you will need way more training on those two than you need for Twitter. Twitter could be, if you’re thinking of having a VA or somebody to start helping you, Twitter could be where they practice, where they start from, because you’re not going to have any issues with spamming or anything like that.

Frequency of Posting on Twitter

Allan McNabb: That’s right. And when you talk about how often should you post, Facebook one or two times, LinkedIn one, maybe two times. But with Twitter, it’s 15 times a day. That’s normal. That’s… If you post 15 times a day, you get the most traction, and so that’s also where it’s very helpful to have an application like the one we provide to Graystone that automates that process, because you’re going to be posting the same thing with a great deal of frequency. And so you can just set it up in the software, give the frequency in the software to take care of it for you. So that’s super important. And engagement, people on Twitter, they want to be engaged. And so to reach out to somebody or for them to see you several times a day, that’s what they want. That’s why they’re on Twitter. So…

Jorge Vazquez: Another reason… Sorry to interrupt you Allan, but…

Allan McNabb: Oh, it’s quite alright.

Twitter Forces You to be Concise and to Improve Your Messaging

Jorge Vazquez: What I like about Twitter is that you’re kept in tier the amount of characters that you could put for posting. In what it does, intentionally, or unintentionally, either makes you better when you’re coming out with things to post, right? Because it forces you to have the value statement, as concise in as…

How do you call it as concise as possible, you following? So in Facebook, you can… and you could go…

[vocalization]

Twitter, you have to really have your mass message really tied up, so it’s a really good tool for that as well.

Allan McNabb: Yeah, that’s great. It helps you perfect your message.

Jorge Vazquez: Yes. You value steaming your elevators, speech. All of those things. It’s really good for that.

Twitter’s Demographic

That’s right, that’s right. So Twitter is a great channel, and perhaps let’s look a little bit on our cheat sheet here, just a little bit, and I’ll share my screen, there might be some also who haven’t been able to get that, and I’ll just put that up on my screen there, and again, you can go into the chat, I think we’ve got it probably posted on Facebook Live, the link that you can grab that, but there’s some good reasons to use Twitter, and we’ll get down to the demographics in a second, because they have their own…

Twitter has its own unique demographics, but of course, it’s free marketing. And I mean, you’re already going to do Facebook, you’re going to do Instagram, and if you use a software application very inexpensively, as we provide to Graystone, and you just do Twitter also, so it costs you nothing. It doesn’t even cost you any extra time, so it’s free marketing. And it also lets you follow your competitors, which is super important. We talked about this with the Tuesday show I did with Ray about knowing your competitors, because look, we are competing, and so a lot of times, businesses will do their customer support on Twitter. They will take complaints on Twitter, and they’ll reply to that.

Allan McNabb: So you can learn a lot about your competitors by following them on Twitter. You can connect with your customers, with your prospects, you may say, well, I don’t like Twitter, but maybe your customers and your prospects do. And so that’s going to give them the channel that they like. And one thing Twitter is really good with is brand awareness. You get your name out there, you’ve got your automation set up, you’re getting out 15 or so tweets a day, your name is out there, it’s in front of everyone. And younger people love the visual channels, and so Twitter is perfect for that. Use an image every time, Post videos, post memes, Twitter is great for that. Now, let’s talk about the demographic for a little bit, Twitter demographic is tilt a little younger, a little more educated, with a little more money, so it doesn’t have as many people on it as Facebook does or Instagram does, but it has a particular demographic that is perfect for business people, and as a matter of fact, a great deal of those who are followed on Twitter are small businesses and what is a realtor? Small Business.

And so it is a great… It is a great channel for real estate and for a small business. Another thing that’s very unique for Twitter, and I’ve got this on our cheat sheet, that 60% of a brand’s followers are more likely to purchase a recommended product after following them on Twitter. Now, 60% is a large number. So let’s say you’ve got a percentage of your prospects and your customers who are on Twitter, and if you can connect on Twitter, you have greatly elevated your… The possibility of them being a customer and being a repeat customer. So you know you may not be into Twitter yourself. Hey, that’s fine. But as we’ve been talking about… We have to know how to play the game, then we have to play the game. It doesn’t matter if you like Twitter or not. The thing is, your prospects are on Twitter, so as business people, we gotta learn how to use Twitter, we’ve got to be efficient with it, and we’ve gotta do a great job. Now, Ray, let me toss it over to you for a second, and then I’ll also see if if Jorge has any thoughts for us, but Ray or Jorge, either one, if you’ve got some thoughts for us, please share those with us.

Ray Hendricks: Alright, can you hear me now?

Allan McNabb: Yeah, we can hear you.

Take Advantage of Twitter and Use It

Ray Hendricks: Alright, I’m not the Twitter professional, I actually use Twitter the least. So that’s why I came to this to try to figure out how I could be better at it, so Jorge would be better at answering that than me.

Jorge Vazquez: Whatever.

[laughter]

Allan McNabb: Yeah, yeah, and the thing of it is, Ray, what I really appreciate is… And I think this is true for a lot of business people. Twitter is this unknown entity out there. And so they don’t take advantage of Twitter. And it’s the same as very true with a lot of the real estate professionals and agents and realtors, etcetera, like that. And you see, okay, this is a channel, and I need to learn how to use this channel, so. And of course.

You know, get out there, start using it. You’re going to pick up some tips, you’re going to learn some things, but just like everything else, it’s… You know it’s like Jose, you know, he’s starting to make videos, he starting to put them on YouTube, you just jump in there and you start doing it, you know, and then you’re going to improve and learn as you go with that. Alright, so Jorge, do you have another thought for us there?

Jorge Vazquez: Yeah, like I said, I think it’s a supplement to everything you do. You can call yourself a guru or a master or whatever the case may be, and not have Twitter, come on. You need to have to Twitter. Everybody has Twitter. So, going back to that perception. You got no choice, you gotta have it. So now that we know that you have to have it, the point is that you want to have two followers and look like a fool, or do you want to have at least a decent amount five, 10000 followers. So perception is reality, guys, unfortunately, and reality is how you make money. So you gotta look at that, very important.

Allan McNabb: Yeah.

Twitter is a Good Tool for Client Retention and More Forgiving

Jorge Vazquez: To me, Twitter is not so much of reaching out to new clients, is more of maintaining the clients I have. Because it’s a very quick way of me doing a quick post and letting them know what’s going on with my industry right away. It allows me to cheat in a way, right? Because if I go to LinkedIn that out of all the social media pages, LinkedIn is the most professional. Right? Would you guys say that LinkedIn is the most professional?

Ray Hendricks: Absolutely.

Jorge Vazquez: So when you posted something, in LinkedIn, you’re going to make sure that your grammar is correct, you gotta have good quality pictures, you have to do this, and you gotta make sure that you gotta have an article, actually you gotta pay somebody to write an article. Facebook is a little less but Twitter is just a thought, just online. It’s very easy for you to be a movie star and create a line, or be just be a regular Joe, Joe like you and I, and keep your clients updated with a line or two, so that capability of the flexibility of allowing you to just be yourself in a way.

I’m not going to talk about our president and other people, but it allows you to make a message quick, and you don’t have to ask for forgiveness. You just, a quick line, “Hey, wow, did you guys see what happened in the market, did you see what’s going on today.” It allows you to be relaxed and be able to stay in front of your audience a lot easier, without having to worry about being too professional in a way.

Allan McNabb: Yeah, you know, and it’s called micro-blogging, you get just a very few characters, I mean the chance you get a tweet out while sitting at a stoplight, you know. It’s just… You can just multi-task., can be a commercial. You didn’t record the show, you got a commercial. You can get it out. It’s just all about thinking about it and doing it like we’ve been talking about with a lot of these things.

Jorge Vazquez: Let me put it on your perspective, sometimes you’re not going to do a post at 10 o’clock at night in LinkedIn, you physically can’t. You need to be sharp, you need to be able to put really good image, you need to… Before you do anything in LinkedIn, Facebook, the same. Twitter: You go at 9:00, you have a thought that you think is really good…

[vocalization]

And nobody would mind, whoever wants to read it will read it, nobody’s going to feel offended because you posted something so late, so that’s the flexibility that Twitter allows you to have, with your audience, think about that.

Allan McNabb: That’s… That’s right, hey let me share… Let me share my screen. Once again, I want to just take a look at our cheat sheet again, if you haven’t downloaded this yet, you can get it out of the chat, you can get the URL there, you can get it all Facebook Live, and really… It’s really the same thing as we talked about with LinkedIn.

Determine Your Twitter Marketing Strategy

You have to decide what’s your marketing strategy. Maybe your marketing strategy is just appearance, if somebody checks me out on LinkedIn. Excuse me, on Twitter, they’re going to see that I’m there, that I’m tweeting, that I’m current with what’s going on. I’ve got syndicated, I’m syndicating articles there tweets to those, and as we’ve talked about before. That’s just automation. So that’s just setting up your social media app and just letting it roll.

And if that’s your strategy for Twitter, fine. You know, if you want to take it a little bit beyond that, determine who’s your audience, and then speak to your audience. What your demographic? If you’re doing residential real estate, you know, what’s your demographic with that? What are the… Your prospects. What’s their demographic? And maybe it’s investors. Maybe it’s both. And so, figure that out. And then your strategy, just like with LinkedIn, just like with Facebook. Figure out your strategy. Am I using Twitter to take people to other social channels, and then I can lead generate. Or am I using Twitter actually as a lead generation tool, so just sort of figure that out so that you know how to be using Twitter. And how much time to be putting into it. Because if all you’re going to do is… And this is a very valid thing: If all you’re going to do is to have an appearance, so someone checks you out, “Oh, this guy is legit. Yeah, he’s real. Yes, he’s active. Yes, he’s alive. Yes, he’s tweeting.” That’s just an automation with software, no problem.

Optimize Your Profile

And the other thing is we talked about also with LinkedIn, we talked about it with Facebook, just optimize your profile. And that’s to have a banner image, a profile image, to have your name, to have your Twitter handle, to have your short description or bio, to have a link to your website. And as we talked about with Facebook, just keep a tweet pinned, really important tweet, maybe it’s a video, maybe it’s something important, and then swap that out from time to time. So a lot of these things are really the exact same thing. You’re just doing it on a different channel, and you’re doing it on a different platform. But really what you’re doing is the same thing. Now, Jorge, Do you have any thoughts for us as far as nailing down your demographic, or your strategy? Any thoughts for us with that?

Twitter Makes it Easy to Follow Trends

Jorge Vazquez: Nothing specific. But one thing that I wanted to mention on Twitter is it’s easier to follow trends through Twitter. And I see a lot of people that do this very smartly. May the fourth be with you. Then maybe that’s something that you put within Star Wars, with a Yoda or something, you put your message with a Yoda, right? Twitter allows you to be on top of trends faster than anything else. You could go in and say, “Well, everybody’s talking about this specific topic.” And I used to do this a lot. Whatever is trending, I’ll make sure that I will type whatever type of marketing I’m doing, or articles I’m doing. I remember, Alan, we did this years ago. What was it? “These are not the Androids you’re looking for”, it was a Star Wars theme. “These are not the loans you’re looking for”, referring to some of the toxic loans that were in the past before supreme loans and stuff like that. So Twitter allows you to see what’s trending and utilize it in your other social medias. You’re more expert than me, Allan, in regards to finding different target markets on that.

Allan McNabb: Yeah, and the trends… Twitter will tell you what is trending. In the software we use, one click you can find out what’s trending on Twitter. And it’s just like the COVID-19. We talk about current events, COVID-19, how it’s affecting real estate. Jorge’s done videos on that. I’ve done videos with our business. We get that out on social media. So you take something that people are talking a lot about, and then you talk about that in a way that relates to your industry because people are looking up and we’ll talk about hashtags in a moment. They’re using hashtags. They’re doing searches with hashtags. And so, if you relate somehow to these trends and then use that hashtag, you’re going to get a lot more visibility with people. So that’s a super important thing to do.

Who to Follow on Twitter

Alright, let’s just go down a little bit here, who to follow, we talked about this a little bit, customers, prospects, competition. I spelled that wrong. Competition, referral partners, influencers, all of that. Because as Jorge mentioned, if someone is successful, someone is out there marketing, they’re going to be on Twitter. And you think about, well, the biggest people in your industry. You think about Greystone. You think about Jorge. You think about all that he has done. They’re all on Twitter. So any of these, whether it’s your customers, your prospects, whatever it is, as we’ve been talking about, sorta even spying on your competition, do that. Follow and then as Jorge was talking a little bit about as the Twitter followers is notified with Gmail, just click on there and engage. Just like the example, Jorge gave us in LinkedIn. When someone would comment on a LinkedIn post, he would click on their name, go see a little bit about them, and then engage them in relationship to where they live, what they’re doing, something such as that. So it’s really doing the same thing on different channels. Alright so… And, Jorge, I see that you shared your screen there. That’s cool. And I see you brought up the trends. I appreciate that. So tell us a little bit about that if you would, Jorge.

Jorge Vazquez: So they’re easy to find. You go to home, and then you go to trends, and it tells you what’s the number one topic that people are searching in Twitter. You can look at this in a daily basis and have an idea of what people are talking the most, right? So there’s a chance that if you could tie some of your marketing to any of these words here, there’s a chance that you get three to 10 times more, the type of clicks that you’re looking for, the type of builds that you’re looking for because these are topics. And you don’t need a marketing company to tell you this. Twitter does it for free. You could go here and know, “Oh, okay, they’re talking about Attorney General,” or whatever the case, might be real estate, debt star. How can I put that through SEO? This is really good for SEO. Anytime you writing an article, taking some of the top trends, and writing about it, Google loves that. And you get all of this information from Twitter. I just wanted to show that.

Allan McNabb: Yeah, I appreciate that because that’s free information. You know what’s hot, what’s the hot topics. That’s free information, and Twitter is giving it to us. And if it’s hot on Twitter, you know where else it’s hot? Probably going to be hot everywhere else, and including Google. So free information, so take that and learn to use the hashtags, and you saw those in some of the trends there, it’s a…

Adjust the number sign, and then without any spaces, it’s just whatever that trending hashtag is, NationalDayofPrayer, no spaces or anything. And if you can think of a way to relate yourself to whatever those trending topics are then you’re going to have a lot more visibility, whether it’s COVID-19, whether it’s National Day of Prayer, whether it’s, “May the Fourth be with you.” whatever it is, as we’ve been talking about, as real estate agents, really your marketers. And you could sell anything you could sell real estate, you could sell cars, you could sell whatever. And so, it’s really just taking these marketing techniques and applying them to real estate.

What to Tweet About

Now, Jorge, I’m going to pull up my little cheat sheet. If you want to get ready to show any of your tweets, because I’m going to talk about what to tweet about, that would be cool. But, with Twitter here… And I’ve started at the top of the list. What do you tweet about? The first one is questions, because questions are really hot on Twitter and you think about it. We’ve already talked about the type of people that like Twitter, they are people who like to engage, they like to have a conversation and so, of course, questions are right up at the top. To ask a question, and I think I’ve got polls on there also, that’s another way to ask a question. So ask a question and be thoughtful with it. Just don’t ask some stupid thing that everybody says, “Ah, you’re just… He just didn’t know what to ask. He’s just trying to manipulate things.”

But really try to think of some really sincere, thought-provoking questions, to get a conversation started that is what Twitter really is about and Twitter loves… People on Twitter love market information, industry news. So, as real estate professionals, that’s a great opportunity. That if you’re sharing real estate news, marketing news, a lot of people have questions about real estate with what all has been going on with COVID-19 about… You know about the recovery, and those are great things to be sharing with people. Share brand announcements, and as we talked about Tuesday with Ray’s Show, that as a realtor, you gotta think of yourself as a brand, as a business. Just not as a person out there, selling stuff. And Twitter’s great for brand awareness so, giving announcements with that. Post properties, but don’t do too much like we talked about with Facebook and others. Post events, and Twitter’s very much about images, videos, memes, anything visual like that.

Links to blog content is really hot on Twitter. And Twitter it only allows a few characters. So, to have a link and to bring them to your website to consume content, so important because what’s going to happen. If they do that enough, hopefully they’re going to fill out a lead generation form, they’re going to be in your database, now you could email market to them and what form of marketing has the highest return on investment, Internet marketing? It’s email marketing. So that’s eventually where you want to get them. We talked about trending topics. That’s hot, tips, put on testimonials of your clients, put on motivational content, put holidays out there and use hashtags. Now, you can make up your own hashtag. But you know what? Nobody knows your hashtag, nobody’s following your hashtag. So it’s okay, make up your own hashtag and use that. But more than that, find out those trending hashtags and use those because that’s what everybody’s using to find content on Twitter and you want to jump on that bandwagon. Alright, so Jorge, do you have any thoughts there on the type of posts for Twitter?

Jorge Vazquez: Absolutely, it’s like anything the more time you put into it, the more thought you put into it, the better results you’re going to have. So if you pick topics that are trending right now and tie them to your market, of course they’re going to help you. So, once again, I love Star Wars, I’m a huge fan of Star Wars since I was born in 1977, that was one of the first movies I watch. So, anytime I do anything or there’s a new Star Wars movie coming up or a new movie that’s relevant to a lot of people. I create articles that are funny in a way, funny sales, then if you add funny, you have something that’s trending and you tie it to something that’s going to generate you sales, that’s the perfect mixture right there.

So, its all about how much time you want to put into it. So, making sure that your topic is trending, making sure that the information is concise. Once again, Twitter doesn’t allow you to have too much, to write too much, so your value statement has to be very sharp, quick, to the point. In the interactions, it’s just like anything, like I was telling you guys about Twitter yesterday. I’m sorry, LinkedIn yesterday. You have a post, if somebody hits Like, interact with that person, say “Thank you for liking” or, follow that person back or send him a message. If you don’t do any type of interaction, you’re only doing 20% of it. You’re putting yourself out there in your posting but if you’re not creating that interaction, then you just…

Your chances of getting more views on your post go down. Also with Twitter, this is your opportunity to freaking spam the heck out of a social media page with no issues. You can have a very low skilled employee do this for you, you don’t need to have somebody with a lot of knowledge. Sorry guys about that. That’s my dog, I’m sorry. Working from home. But that’s pretty much it, I think that it’s all about the time that you want to put into it, just like with any social media. But Twitter for me, it’s not so much about getting you clients, it’s about staying in front of the clients that matter to you. That VIP client, that person, that connection you talked to yesterday, that connection you talked to last week, you put them in Twitter and then let Twitter do its thing let Twitter do the work showing that you’re on top of things and you’re going to see a great resource.

Stay in Front of Your Clients

Guys I just picked up an investor that saw me in social media seven years ago. I have not talked to the guy in a long time, I have not done much with the guy, but I can guarantee you the fact that he is on my Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram and all those space made a big difference. So that’s really, really all you do in here. You put so much time up bringing people to your door and but then you don’t do anything about staying in front of them, you don’t… Obviously, you can’t afford to run a TV commercial, or a radio commercial, you can’t do none of those things, but if you take the time to say, “Hey, my friend, I’m going to… Can you sign up to Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram? You get a chance to win something later?” Then let the system do everything else but that commercial coming from every angle is what eventually Converts it into a sale. That’s all I’m going to say, drop the mic.

[laughter] Hey yeah, and if I can give a little anecdotal Well, it’s not even anecdotal it’s factual information. Jorge, you remember it’s been probably over a year ago when you asked us to write an article about the Super Bowl coming to Tampa, and we tied that into why that’s good for investing in real estate. We put that, of course, on the homes for income website, and it’s been going out on social media now for years, that is one of the top articles read on that website. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about. And that topic is going to get a lot hotter the closer we get to the Super Bowl. Believe me. And so that’s just one example, and that’s years of mileage of people through social media and your database coming to a website and then connecting with them. Absolutely 100%.

Allan McNabb: Alright.

Jorge Vazquez: It’s like I’ve always said videos, anything you do in social media has an infinite life, so you can hire a person pay them about $100000 a year, they quit on you in a year, you do a post for free, that post is there forever. Video stays. So just make sure that you understand that, but don’t get frustrated because you did one Tweet and you didn’t get business it doesn’t work like that. You have to be extremely consistent, you have to have a lot of consistency and your clients have to be able to… It’s all about following that client, so they’re in Twitter, they saw your ad they’re out of Twitter they go to LinkedIn they see your ad. So it’s all about persistency with social media.

Twitter’s Search Feature

Allan McNabb: That’s right. That’s right. Well, let me talk about using the search feature for a moment with Twitter, and let me share my screen here. And Twitter has one of the best search features of any of the social channels, so this can help you to find prospects, it can help you to find influencers. And remember, an influencer is someone who has a large following. And when they say something, thousands and thousands, maybe millions of people are listening to what they’re saying. And if you can build a relationship with an influencer and they begin to re-tweet and to share, and things like these, then you’re going to blow up. Well, Twitter has one of the best search features. And at the top of this screen, I’m just using the standard search feature right here. And I said, “Want to buy a house Tampa?” And of course, you’re going to find the people who like you as your competition, that they’re trying to find people to sell houses to, but here’s a guy right here, “I want to buy a house in Tampa, preferably new near Brandon Riverview.” “If near downtown, big condo, new they’re around 150,000.” And so really easily put in this phrase.

There you go, and then all I do is I click right here and I can start a conversation with this fellow that wants to buy a house. So you can see how easy it is to prospect. And you look at it, how much time would you spend out beating the streets to try to find one person who wants to buy a house and here’s a fellow right here who has already told you, “Hey I want to buy a house.” This is how easy it is to find it. And of course, you can go… And you can go down through here and you can just look.

Here’s another guy, “I’m staying in Miami and then boarding a cruise ship tomorrow. I love Tampa, though, and want to buy a house there one day.” Now is the time to start building a relationship with this person that wants to buy a house in Tampa, that’s just a few examples. Well, there’s also the ‘Advanced Search’ and you can really start nailing it down with this. You can say, “It’s gotta be all of these words, it’s gotta be this exact phrase,” and you can just really start to narrow it down and to get even to find more so exactly what you want. And so use the ‘Search’ feature, find some of these searches like this and if you’re like me, I like to watch some TV, I like to watch some Shark Tank, and you can just really easily go here, check out your computer, see if there’s anybody who wants to buy a house and if it is, hey, just start a conversation with that person and find out those searches that work really good for your niche and your industry. Alright, Jorge any comments there? We can start wrapping up in a few minutes, but any comments there as we start to wind down a little bit.

Jorge Vazquez: No, absolutely this feature of finding the topics that you’re looking for is super powerful. Allan, in the past, we used to have a software that will do this for us and I don’t know if it’s still around. Where you could actually search for all of them and dropping in your inbox here all the people that match these keywords for us to follow up. Is that still available?

Allan McNabb: Yep, still available and…

Jorge Vazquez: Wow.

Allan McNabb: The exact same thing, and it pulls right out of Twitter, you can put this exact search in the software and it will bring these up for you in the software, you click and you engage you don’t even go to Twitter.

Jorge Vazquez: So you could have a VA, do this for you, correct?

Allan McNabb: Yeah, you just set it up, you just have this come in and you just have the VA just operate right out of your software, absolutely. And the software is dirt cheap. It’s the exact software Graystone uses. It starts at 29 bucks a month, I mean dirt cheap, it saves you so much time.

Jorge Vazquez: Very, very powerful guys, very powerful.

Ray Hendricks: Sure is. Sure is.

Jorge Vazquez: Thank you for sharing.

Closing Thoughts

Allan McNabb: Alright, so Ray any, let’s get some closing thoughts here from Ray, and maybe John and some others have some closing thoughts for us there?

[pause]

Allan McNabb: Any closing thoughts for anybody in the audience? Let me check, I’ve not checked to see if we’ve got any chats here lately, I’ve been just so thoughtful of that. Jon, any thoughts for you there, from you there?

Jon: Yeah, I wanted to articulate this, but I haven’t used Twitter very often, maybe twice in my life, so this is another eye-opening experience, to be honest.

Allan McNabb: Well, thank you man, I appreciate that and the great job you do and everything, I really appreciate that a lot. Lisa, I appreciate that information, Louisa, thanks for your chat there. I appreciate it so much. Guys, I appreciate the kind comments, I’m just reading down through there, appreciate it so much. And as we proceed with our trainings, we want to do one on YouTube, super big. We want to do one on Instagram, super big for millennials. We want to do one on Facebook with Facebook ads, a lot of things we want to do trainings on, we’re going to start doing it every other week, and I think we’re going to try from five to six, so let us know what’s a good schedule for you guys and we got… I got a lot of trainings coming up. Alright, so let’s go on and wrap it up and Jorge, do you have a final comment for us as we get ready to shut her down?

Jorge Vazquez: Guys, perception is reality. So make sure that you have your Twitter account, looks professional, but you have some followers and that you look the part, super important. The tool of searching is amazing and I’m not going to lie to you, I completely forgot about it, used to use it a lot, but I used to use Twitter with the software that would do this for me…

[vocalization]

And will have it in my inbox very, very cool. And also the trending. Check on what’s trending, we have a really good agent that does that, his name is Mo Marley. He just sees what’s trending and whatever he’s going to do in his social media pages whatever, he takes that information and Twitter’s a really good way to do that, and that’s pretty much it. And following up with your clients, making sure it’s just another easy way of being in front of your clients, remember that it tells you any time you have a new contact. So if you have your Gmail account connected, it will say to you, “Hey Ray just joined Twitter. John just joined Twitter, Juan just joined Twitter.” How easy that is. All you have to do is check once a week, add them and you could organically grow it very fast. Thank you for the time guys, supposed to be in a call, 10 minutes ago, but… [laughter]

Allan McNabb: Oh. We will let you get to that and will go on and close out and I’m Allan McNabb with Image Building Media, and our website for real estate agents is xpertRealtyMarketing, and Jorge give us your website there.

Jorge Vazquez: My website is GraystoneIG.com, that’s GraystoneIG.com. ‘At Graystone, you invest and we do the rest,’ you could also visit us at homes4income.com, that is, homes the number four, income.com. And that’s pretty much it. Thank you so much for the time, I appreciate it.

Allan McNabb: Alright guys, thank you very much and we’ll closeout, and I appreciate you being with us so much…

Image Building Media

Image Building Media is an internet marketing company based in Tampa, Florida, serving clients in various industries throughout the U.S.

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