Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

How would you feel by discovering that your account on Twitter has been suspended and all the followers you have now find a unfriendly owl picture telling them to move along there is nothing there to see anymore. How much a hit would that be for your pride knowing that all people searching for your name on Google and finding your Twitter account (which is ranking pretty high) would find out that you have been suspended due to strange activity?

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Twitter policy about spamming is becoming more and more stringent also because the abuses are spreading with the growth in popularity of this environment. The policy on how to prevent spam are always evolving and so you’d better check them out regularly if you are serious about creating a presence on Twitter. Yet one of the most stressed one in recent times is about “follower churning”. What is it? Let’s take the definition given on the Twitter official site: “If you have followed and unfollowed people in a short time period, particularly by automated means (aggressive follower churn)”.

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Following new people and then unfollowing those that don’t follow you back has been one of the key methods for increasing the follower count and one of the most controversial. Recently more attention is being put by Twitter developers to this practice and Doug Williams, one of the Twitter platform developers, has stated recently that using automatic software to add a large number of social connections daily and then breaking the connection with those who don’t reciprocate can result in account suspension.

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It is again a matter of size and numbers. You can still follow and unfollow, but when big numbers and too fast a churn come into play your account can be suspended. Following many people all at once and un-following many of them the same day is almost sure cause of suspension.

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Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. If you want to discover more about Twitter and how to create a big following, check out Sean Malarkey’s recent course http://budurl.com/twittercourse

What would be your first impression in meeting with someone who conceals his face or wears a mask and tries to sell something to you from the get go without even introducing himself? Disgust, rejection, annoyance and maybe also a bit of fear.

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So how do you believe people react to you when they first meet you on Twitter and try to find out who you are? The information you put in your biography, the picture you publish in your profile and the name you record in your settings can make all the difference in the world and can prevent you from being banned! Read carefully the following instructions!

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Your Twitter profile is very important for your success in social media and there are some major mistakes that can prevent you from gaining credibility or followers:

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1. A suspect username
   Your Twitter username will always be present in any contact or communication you will do. Some people use their own first and last name, some use a “brand” name that communicates what activity they want to perform, others use the name of their company or site, and finally some chose just a fantasy name. These are all fine choices, but make sure you don’t get mistaken for a spammer: they usually use a girl name followed by numbers or a gibberish combination of letters and numbers, like “jhyudh265”. These are all fake accounts that get shut down and that people avoid.
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2. Omitted or altered real name
   Whatever the username you chose, make sure you also add your real first and last name in the profile, and that they are SEPARATED from one another (there is a space between the first and last name). People will search for you on Google and will find your Twitter profile(s) only if they contain your real name, spelled as in real life.

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3. No image
   People will decide whether to connect with you in a few seconds. If you have no photo of yourself or no image whatsoever, the vast majority will stay away from you. This is true of every social network, not only Twitter.
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4. Missing site
   You will lost most of the benefit of connecting with people if you don’t have a site, blog or simple page where they can find more about you and if it doesn’t come up in the profile.
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5. Photo of an object
   You are on Twitter in order to connect with other people, true people. They don’t want to talk to an object and you’ll appear as somebody trying to spam them about a product. Exceptions: it is fine to use objects when you are providing some kind of service which is best described by the object, like the many “bird” picture that coemn up on Twitter related services. Again, be careful as you will be more easily tagged as spammer.
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6. False location or identity
   The fastest way to get banned from Twitter and lose your followers and credibility is to pretend to be somebody else and to live somewhere else than where you actually live.
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7. Pretty girls
   Spammers know very well that people respond better when they see a picture of a nice girl, even better if she is half naked. So they use this trick continually and people have come to recognize it. If you do happen to be a beautiful lady or girl, make sure you have a picture that looks personal and natural.
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8. Somebody else’s photo
   It is usually a bad idea to show somebody else’s picture, like a very well known character or popular figure. If you really don’t want to show your face, you can use a picture that of you at a distance or you can use the picture of a kid, pet or family. Kids and pet create strong relationships and can be also used for the background of your Twitter page.
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9. Sad and bad quality pictures
   Would you put a low quality photo on your resume? So why use it on your Twitter profile? A smile can go a long way. Get a professionally done photo.
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10. Crowded or bad picture
    You have a very limited space, so avoid using pictures that contain too many elements that make it impossible to recognize you. This includes group photos, holding your face in your hands, objects that are in the background and so on.

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Avoid these mistakes and you will have much better results and, most importantly, you’ll avoid being banned from Twitter.

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Roberto Mazzoni

Twitter is a microblogging platform: it allows you to publish short messages called tweets. The tweets are 140 characters long at the outside, only text. They can contain information, a call to action and possibly a link (URL). The tweeples, which is the name by which you designate the people who are on Twitter, are used to click on the link when they find an interesting tweet. Here are 3 rules you can follow in using this powerful tool to direct people to your blog.

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1. Take short meaningful sentences from your blog post and format them into tweets that people can digest and understand immediately and add a link to that specific post.

2. Use an URL shortener to keep the link size to a minimum so that you leave as many of 140 characters available for your message. I personally use budurl because it is free, it does an excellent job at shortening any kind og URL and, if you register on the site, you can keep track of any link, looking at how many people clicked on it.
   

3. Avoid putting more than one link in a single tweet. You could do it, but it is somewhat confusing and you might look like a spammer.
   

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Twitter is a very powerful environment and it can bring lots of traffic to your blog throughout the day if you manage to engage the people who are online and who are following you.

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I suggest to make at least 5 tweets during the day pointing to your blog post, using different words and concepts, although some repetition is allowed. Scatter the tweets evenly during the working hours and you’ll get the best results.

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Roberto Mazzoni

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P.S. Go to www.budurl.com and create an account, you can use it to shorten any type of link and it is very convenient also for e-mails and newsletters.

Recently I have been reading the idea from an online marketer, Peter Drew, that Twitter works like a radio station: you have your own audience, your followers, that listen to your “talk” and that can switch from one “channel” to the next with ease while tracking their favorite music (by the use of keywords). I have expanded on that concept by doing some testing myself and I have noticed seven key elements.

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1. You have only a portion of your followers actually listening to you in any given moment and most of the “listening” happens between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m from Monday through Friday. Ou also have a night crowd but it seems to be different from the people that are listening during the working hours.

2. When you post a tweet (short message) on your Twitter account, your followers have about 10 to 15 minutes to catch it before it fades out of view. Those who will catch it, because they are tuned on your “channel” will respond to it within a few minutes.

3. You can successfully repeat the same tweet at different times of the day, finding a different public every time. I would suggest not repeating the same tweet more than 4 or 5 times, well staggered during the day.

4. The same message can be repeated with different words, so catching a different audience withing a shorter time span (15 minutes, half an hour to one hour).

5. People will respond much better when you “are on the line” giving some personal and unique content, even if it is somebody else’s content that you are simply retweeting.

6. If you are saying something interesting they will retweet your content right away giving it more exposure and sometimes marketers invite directly people to retweet their short messages.

7. You will also have somebody occasionally commenting on what you say few minutes later, joining the conversation with some original content.

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So Twitter does have some similarities with radio in that you have different audiences during the day and they tune in on different streams of conversation, depending on the content. Like radio, they shift very fast from one stream to next and respond better to the subjects that entertain them the most.

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But overall I find it more similar to a town plaza, where people like to hang together and you have occasional new comers joining in spontaneously. It is like when you go to an Italian small city and sit in front of the cafe in the main plaza, or close to some public garden: you will always find people hanging out together who know each other and spend some time chatting about information of common interest, telling jokes and plainly enjoying each other’s company.

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You can join or leave the group when you want and you can follow their conversations making your comments and your stories. And if you are just a stranger passing by and looking for help, you will feel more comfortable turning to this small crowd group rather than just anybody else. And they will always be more willing to help and open to you as compared to the regular guy that is simply walking down the street, minding his own business.

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Roberto Mazzoni

“Growing followers day by day” seems to be the major concern of people on Twitter right now: a survey I have just done indicates that 41% of people are looking for ways to increase their followers daily and this interest is even bigger than “How to monetize Twitter” that has drifted to 36% while being the foremost interest up to a couple of weeks ago. Still 39.5% ofm people indicate that they are looking to “Being able to attract more followers”.

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The best tool I have found so far for managing your followers is Hummingbird by Twitaddict. This is NOT a product for spammers that will create a whole bunch fake accounts and will use them to blast people with commercial messages (tweets). It is NOT even a system that will grow your followers on autopilot or that will make you money overnight. I have been using it for over 3 months now and compared it to other software and systems and I still find it the best.

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It is simply a way for automatizing those tasks that you would perform on your own, particularly following and unfollowing tweeple (people on Twitter) and finding targeted followers.

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The program is amazingly simple: you create a profiles for each Twitter account you want to manage and then you go to your Twitter home page where you do everything you could do within your browser but with some automatic function.

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You can first of all define your VIP’s, the people you will keep following no matter what, wether they follow you back or not. Then you can go on the home page fo any other interesting person on Twitter and follow all the people that he is following or that follow him/her. Hummingbird will automatically follow one person at a time until it reaches the last page or uintil you hit your following limit.

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It will then color code people according to their status in relation to you: green for those that you follow and have followed back, light blue for VIP’s, white for those that you follow but haven’t followed you back, and more.

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You can also do searches for keywords and follow those people that are connected with those keywords.

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Twitter limits the number of people you can follow in proportion to how many follow you therefore you need to un-follow those that do not reciprocate if you want to grow your follower’s list initially. Hummingbird can unfollow automatically all those that don’t follow you back and it puts them into a database (marking them red) so that you don’t follow them again in the future.

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A very effective tool that can save you many hours and build you a strong following. You need to pay for it, but it’s worth it.

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Roberto Mazzoni

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P.S. To get a free trial of Hummingbird immediately go to: http://budurl.com/hummi

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P.SS if you want a 15% discount of the software use the link above and the coupon code: RECESSION