The below video shows how to create a Twitter audience of people who live in your neighborhoods.
Twitter is not something that is easy to track ROI. However, it is a lot simpler and easier to find potential leads on twitter than you would think.
- You don’t need any special tools
- You can build a great targeted audience in just a few hours
- Once you have built a targeted audience, simply login every now and then and tweet something
Watch the Video
Things to Know About Twitter
You need to build an audience for people to see your tweets
This above statement is not entirely true. The reason I put it here however, is because I know a lot of freelance “Twitter Gurus” that are being paid hundreds of dollars a month just to schedule tweets to go out every couple of hours. If you are new to twitter, how it works is that when you sign onto twitter, your feed is filled with tweets from people you follow. So if nobody is following you, your tweets will not show up in their feed.
The reason I said the above statement is not entirely true is because people can search for tweets. And if you use hash tags, or if what they search for is in your tweet, they CAN find your tweet. But that is more of a needle in a haystack of getting in front of people. The best way for people to see your tweets is for them to follow you.
If you follow someone… they are likely to follow you back
It really is that simple! This is how you start building an audience in Twitter. You find out where your target audience is (I’ll go into that below) and then you follow them. Aaannddd Presto! They will more than likely follow you back!
If you retweet someone, they will likely visit your Twitter page
The above statement is more for personal profiles rather than company profiles. Reason being is that companies, especially large companies, are probably retweeted all the time. Don’t expect New York Times to visit your twitter page if you retweet them. They get retweeted all the time.
However, this is not true for personal profiles. The average twitter user would hardly ever be retweeted. If you retweet a personal profile of somebody who wrote something relevant to your community, they’ll wonder who it was that retweeted them. They’ll be notified they were retweeted, go to see who did it, and check out their twitter page. Now of course this doesn’t mean that they’ll instantly list their house for sale with you… but the point is for you to hit their radar as a real estate agent specializing in their neighborhood.
Everything is searchable in Twitter
That’s right! Unless they change the setting where their tweets can’t be seen by everybody, you can literally find somebody who tweeted “moving to [city] next month.” This is one of those needle in a haystack scenarios, but if you’re using twitter, it is good to know this.
How to Find Your Target Twitter Audience
I’ll be honest with you… there’s a lot of garbage on Twitter. By “garbage” (I call it “riff raff” in the video) I mean people ranting, posting selfies and other non-sense. The key to this video is teaching you how to find the following people:
- Responsible Adults
- Active in the Community
- Homeowners
So how do you do this? Well, I’m glad you asked! You basically need to piggy back off of already existing twitter profiles. You need to find the twitter profiles that fulfill the above criteria and start following their followers. I give several examples in the video but list what I consider the most important ones below:
Neighborhood Associations – Who would follow a neighborhood association? People who live in the neighborhood, are active in their community and are responsible adults (possibly homeowners).
Chamber of Commerce – This goes hand in hand with neighborhood associations. The Twitter users following these fulfil all of the above criteria.
Neighborhood News – The twitter users who follow neighborhood news are also more than likely living in that neighborhood. Another good thing about the followers of a “news” related twitter profile is that the people posting half naked selfies on twitter normally aren’t that interested in news… fulfilling the criteria of “responsible adults.”
Other LOCAL Businesses / Associations / Activities
The above three are the best followers to start with. After you’ve found as many of those are you can, you can broaden your twitter audience by finding people who follow other local profiles. These are less targeted because a lot of these people might not live in the neighborhood. As you’re browsing through twitter profiles of your target neighborhoods, look for the ones you think would be the most targeted. A lot of these are:
- Local Bloggers
- Local schools / districts
- Local Businesses / activities
- What else is unique about your neighborhoods?
Things to Remember
Start by Following Business Pages
Everything I’ve written above is basically getting the followers of the business pages. However, you want to start by following (and they will inevitably follow you) the business pages. The reason is that if you start with the personal Twitter pages, they may visit your profile and see that you are not following anything regarding their neighborhood.
Have a few tweets before you start the above process
Just like the point I wrote above, you will be much less likely to be followed if somebody goes to your twitter page and see’s you haven’t tweeted anything yet. Have a few tweets up (your new listings, news about neighborhoods, etc) before you start the above process. Also, don’t be too self promotional… spread the Twitter love and it will be returned to you.
Automating Manual Processes
It is my personal opinion that manually adding people is the best way to go. It doesn’t take that much time and you’re sure to not follow a bunch of the “riff raff” I spoke of in the video. There are tools that can automatically follow people who are following somebody, but I don’t use them because you want to see the good posts to tweet when you log into twitter. The “riff raff” will blow up your feed and you will spend most of your time unfollowing people.
Now with that being said, you can use tools to automate your tweets and find good content to tweet. Here are ones I use. Note: Some of them are affiliate links:
Commun.it (affiliate link)- A great tool to auto respond to people, monitor, schedule, analyze and create reports on your twitter activity.
BuzzSumo – This is a free tool (paid version available) to find the most popular / shared content around a keyword.