Twitter Prospecting

I must say that I love the Twitter technology. Thanks to Iranian elections, it has reached critical mass which means that most of your target clients are not on the network. I routinely use the technology to offer discounts to the RedX service and to provide updates on dedicated the dedicated listing URL service, and know that for a REALTOR, it can be a very large source of leads.

So as a real estate agent that is new to Twitter, how do you use it to get sales leads? Well, the service provides a window into your client’s mind, and ancillary services give you instant notification when your client is thinking about real estate. You can then connect with that prospect online to direct them toward your services. It’s sort of like someone making the announcement in a crowded room that they are looking for a home, and you responding to them by saying, that’s great because I have one to sell. So how do you get set up to use Twitter as a lead generation tool? My recommendations would be as follows:

1) Register for a Twitter account, upload your picture, add your website, change the background, and make yourself at home.

2) Register for notify.me which is a notification service that will let you know if someone adds a post that includes your search terms.

3) Choose the methods by which notify.me will let you know when a search term comes up. I use google chat for my desktop and the mobile text function for when I am out.

4) Set the system to notify you when someone looks for a specific phrase that would be unique to your target clients. You can also add filters to better limit the notifications that are not pertinent. For example, use the search terms “moving to” “salt lake” and filter our terms that include words such as “planning rent.” With that phrase, you will likely get tweets from people moving to salt lake, that are not planning to rent. You can add multiple search phrases to keep track of and the notices simply popup on your desktop.

5) When a notice is received, follow that person, reply to their tweet, and offer your services. It is really that simple.

Getting Your Site to the Top of Google –Real Time Update

To report on the progress of the experiment to demonstrate how to get your website for a given search term, in this instance “agents online” to show up within the first ten listings of Google, we have now achieved position number seventeen for the organic search. This has been about ten hours worth of work. If you are using these techniques to get a high ranking for your own real estate agent website just think of the number of prospective listings / buyers will end up landing on your website. In addition, you end up with a premium ranking and don’t need to make such a heavy investment in pay per click.

So just to recap the process, again,

1) Use google keywords tool to find a target keyword. High number of searches returning low page rank results. If you are targeting a specific service, REO’s, Short Sales, etc, you can get very targeted.

2) Register a URL using that search term. Our example for this experiment is AgentsOnline.org

3) Optimize your website or landing page to support that keyword and format the site for collection of your prospect’s contact information. For our example I created a thee page site feeding into the Listing and FSBO lead service from RedX.

4) Start getting backlinks to the URL that you have created. I add links from my blogs and created a couple of Squidoo lenses. I also comment often on the real estate blogs that I read and include the URL.

Just to summarize, that is the process. Pretty simple and if you do it three or four times, you can maximize your visibility on google which essentially automates the search engine optimization for your real estate website.