Matt Fagioli organizer of ReTechSouth and I were talking last night. “I agree to talk while you are talking” is how I described the practice of following those on twitter who follow you in a bid to get your follower numbers up.
This practice seems near mindless. Most people who agree to take on hundreds or thousands of courtesy followers immediately filter them out using Tweet Deck or some other software (you’re not so clever, they do the same to you!)
I recently asked a couple of friends who have thousands (one has over ten thousand) followers to tweet one of my blog posts with a Tiny URL (a great tool BTW) attached.
Later I checked Google Analytics (another great tool) to see the number of visitors received from Twitter from my friends’ tweets. The amounts of visitors were surprising:
- the low teens.
In contrast I have just 120 followers. When I tweet a blog post I get about 13-17 visits- about the same number of visits as my friends get even though I have 5-10X fewer followers. I follow about 60 people and read just about every tweet. The people I follow are carefully selected as they post great tweets and retweet stuff they pick up. The small number of people I follow act as my filter and help me stay informed.
Are your followers REALLY following you? Probably not. Nor are you following your followers. In the mad dash to get followers are you merely involved in a Ponzi scheme of self obsession?
It seems that for large numbers Twitter can be used to broadcast or to listen, but not both at the same time.
This makes twitter possibly less scalable than we imagine.
Having lots of followers is perhaps less important than having quality followers.
The same goes for traffic to a web site. Zillow recently drove a lot of traffic to their site by announcing a Zestimate of the White House (go ahead and click on the link, then ask yourself of what use is this type of visitor to a Realtor-are they going to help sell the White House? is the visitor a qualified buyer?)
Quality traffic matters as should quality followers.
In the mad race to get bragging rights to the most number of followers, quality seems to have fallen off the radar.
Are you ignoring proven lead generation methods to your financial detriment and spending inordinate amounts of time on twitter talking to each other, gaining followers or just trying to figure it out?
Not getting any real amounts of business from twitter?
Why do you think they call it “social” media?
For further thoughts on twitter see:
Speaking in Thumbs – Do We Need To Twitter?
Twitter would probably work better for vendors or loan officers who sell stuff to real estate agents. Not sure how effective agents are going to be meeting with clients on twitter, however, @pkitano has a clever solution for integrating a twitter network into a niche hyper-local blog. I believe that Twitter will play a big role in communication and marketing, but we’re still too early in the game to fully measure its value.
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Mark
Agreed if someone is going to figure it out, Pat will be one of them
As you mention, it makes sense for vendors to be meeting realtors online. I am not sure it makes sense for realtors to spend a lot of time talking to each other, unless the purpose is purely social – nothing wrong with that.
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Louis,
I believe that there is a financial benefit in being social for agents to agents. Building relationships with other local agents is important right now. I mean, friends keep friends in the business. It is always helpful when you can call a listing agent you’re familiar with from Twitter and and work through a deal as humans. Twitter helps open those doors.
Back to the main point of your article – I follow a lot of people mainly just to feel plugged in. It is such low maintenance networking that it makes sense to at least follow the basic procedures on Twitter. I don’t read everything, and I probably spend 3 – 5 minutes a day there. But, if I need to shoot someone like Pat a quick note, Twitter is way more convenient than email or phone.
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Louis,
I have two Twitter accounts. One is purely hyper-local. I have followers from elsewhere, but I don’t follow people there unless they are local to my area. The other is for socializing with other agents… and anyone else I think is cool to follow.
I would love to spend more time on Twitter, but I don’t get to do that… but I do jump in from time to time. And in those instances it is nice to have a range of people to communicate with.
For the local account, I advertised that it would only be local content and not chit-chat… and that is what it is.
Bottom line is that I think Twitter is becoming more of a broadcast media, but there are good opportunities to connect with local clients if the message is focused on that. There are opportunities to socialize with peers, but I don’t know if the two mix well.
March 26th, 2009 at 7:50 am
Thanks so much for the heads up — well worth the read.
August 16th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
I still believe that facebook has more value than twitter for business. Any thoughts or objections?
August 17th, 2009 at 6:39 pm
@robert “I still believe that facebook has more value than twitter for business. Any thoughts or objections?”
Nope HomeGain is better than both combined!
You can use all three together
August 17th, 2009 at 6:48 pm