BTW If possible, I’d be really interested to see how many visits Peter got from his shar.es links to that page.

Thanks for that.. just what I was after..

I find that many of the affiliate marketing people only follow you because they want you to follow them. A one way street so to speak.

In the end I really don’t want to follow the internet affiliate marketers but the other day I did not get around to deleting a few of them from following me and found that after a couple of days they had deleted themselves.

I assume that they are using tweetlater or some other automation service to unfollow anybody that does not follow them. So I think I will trial not deleting them and see how that works… and when I don’t follow them back many of them will unfollow anyway. Anybody that remains can just get some real estate related news

Your visitor stats on your article were interesting. I use the bit.ly service and total visitors to them were 137 of which 25 were from my post the rest were from people who used twitterfeed (see below). I thought 25 from my followers at the time which only numbered high 30′s at that time was really good. I guess thats because I manually kept the quality of the list to the real estate industry pretty high.

Searching Twitter (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=ugly+side+of+twitter) I found out that..

* at least 5 of your followers Retweeted the article

* at least 5 other people people independently track this blog with twitterfeed and broadcasted on twitter the articles posted on here. These 5 represented the other 112 clicks.

* 2 other people read the article on the web and tweeted it and one person retweeted that. They used tinyurl so we dont know how many people clicked on that tweet and read the article.

There are quite a few URL shortening services but bit.ly, Tr.im and Tinyurl are the most popular and B2 WordPress uses Cl.igs. Without access to the Tinurl and Cl.igs stats I cant be accurate but it would be easily conceivable that across all of Twitter that over 400 people viewed that article.. Probably more. Ya gotta be happy with that Peter!!

Suddenly, one person in one of the cars following me will see a short message that I hold up in the back window & they may decide to point it out to their friends (ReTweet).

On the other hand, if the message is no good they will simply ignore it and wait for the next message. Or if the message is something that they don’t like they will decide to change lanes & stop following me.

By using Tweet Deck you’ll find that managing it all is really easy, because it’s like closing the windows on the bus. It filters out all the noise outside the bus.

Also Glenn, I follow internet marketers & they follow me because I’m an internet marketer as well as a Real Estate Coach.

You’ll find that there will be lots of other people following me too & I just simply filter out the noise through Tweet Deck.

But I’ll never know if someone reading my tweets may be interested in real estate or maybe they have a friend who is & they forward my message onto a friend as a recommendation.

Actually, on Facebook I’m getting people who know real estate agents sending me friend recommendations to add on my Facebook & my Twitter followers are growing & growing each day.

Whilst I don’t know these people personally, I can slowly build trust online & they will either use my services or recommend me to their friends. Isn’t that what agents would want too – personal referrals.

The best thing that can happen to your message on Twitter is to have it retweeted to help to increase your audience & help to build your credibility online.

Whilst the conversion rate won’t be very high from Twitter, I think of it like what happens with a typical email marketing campaign.

On an email marketing campaign, a good click through rate is about 20%. So if an agent has a monthly newsletter that goes out to their database, realistically only 1/5th of their database will read their message.

Which means that if you send out newsletters monthly & only had unique readers from your database reading the monthly newsletters (which doesn’t happen) then it would take 5 months to get your whole database to read one of your newsletters.

The beauty of having a lot of followers on Twitter means that you can tweet a few times a day & so long as your message is interesting then people will be pleased that the have followed you & they will look forward to your next Tweet.

For instance Glenn, here’s the stats so far from the Tweet I sent about your post on this blog about the ugly side of Twitter http://screencast.com/t/UtwSpJL3FqM.

When posting this comment there had been 118 visits ( 97 Humans & 21 Bots) sent across to your post.

PS. Glenn, let me know if you’d like me to tweet it again. lol

Quantity versus Quality.

I have been hit with a lot of what I consider irrelevant followers. People that are internet marketers, affiliate marketers and just general spammers. To date I have been deleting them as fast as they follow.

My reasons is I want to have quality followers. Now somepeople recommend this but others say get as many followers as you can.

Greg, I noticed that you have your fair share of these Internet Marketers… I am not begrudging them a living, I just don’t want them as followers.. As far as I can see I have nothing to gain from them other than occassional ReTweet some of them might do.

Do you leave them because you see a benefit from having them there or you just could not be bothered filtering them out? It takes time checking them all out and deleting them and keeping on top of them is a chore.

Has anybody heard of some sort of spam or black list that exists to get rid of these guys automatically??

Rgds,
Sal

1. Building Trust
Buyers distrust agents. It’s their first instinct. Because they have that initial distrust of agents they are extremely critical of anything that could be misleading in your ads & they will get more frustrated about an agent not emailing them back or calling them back than they would within other industries, eg. waiting in a doctors waiting room or poor restaurant service, etc.

We are living in a want it now society & most people expect that the agent should be able to respond at their beck & call at any time. And, this happens whether they be a seller, buyer, landlord or tenant.

Rather than just using REA & Domain, etc to generate buyer leads, you can actually use the conversation style internet that things like Twitter, Facebook, blogs. etc provide & you can leverage these tools to build relationships & break down the distrusting barriers.

For instance, every day agents are speaking with or meeting up with buyers & are building trust with those people one on one. They spend a lot of time answering buyers questions about certain things that are happening in the market or local bus routes, services, etc. Which is all very important for building trust one-on-one, but why not leverage these answers & provide them in a blog post or a YouTube video, etc so you can re-purpose the content and use it over & over again.

Because Twitter is only 140 characters & has such a huge audience now, it makes it so much easier to get your message out there.

2.Leverage
Twitter not only allows you to generate a lot more visitors across to this content very quickly & on an ongoing basis. But, people will even retweet (RT) your information across to their followers if they find it interesting enough.

To give you an idea Sal, I’m not sure if I mentioned this before, but I automatically send out a Direct Message to thank my Twitter followers & within it I include a link to a Youtube video that I did. It’s a simple video about setting your computer passwords as your goals (it’s a strategy I use that helps me a get ongoing reminders of my goals each day. It’s a simple concept that works really well).

But the best part is that I’ve done the video once & it’s been viewed over 400 times as of now & I get thank you messages from Twitter followers each day about it. ( I’d had very few people see the video before I’d put it on my Twitter DM message ).

Most of these people I’ve never met & yet they’ve now met me via a 3 – 4 minute video and hopefully they will want to learn more from me.

So now that one video message that only took me a few minutes to do helps me to start building trust online with my twitter followers & it will keep doing it automatically for years & years to come.

Twitter is permission marketing & basically when someone follows you on Twitter they’ve basically subscribed to the RSS feed of your Tweets & they choose to recieve that feed or not by either continuing to follow you or un-folow you.

The spamming part comes into it when someone just keeps on promoting their own product all the time.

Real estate agents may find it a little hard to comprehend why an agent would want to waste their time posting a tweet on Twitter about anything other than something that would send people back to their website or to one of their own listings.

The main reason why you don’t tweet your listings all the time is because you will quickly bore your audience & lose your followers.

Twitter is a micro-blogging tool & if you think of your tweeting like this blog, if Peter kept talking about his web design or Glenn kept posting about the listings from his Nerang office, they would quickly lose their readership.

Post a few tweets about interesting real estate articles, blog posts, etc on sites based on either the real estate market or local news & information within your service area & then you’ll find that people will follow you because you are helping to share helpful news & information about your local area & real estate trends.

Think of it like you’re at a party. Do people ask you “How’s the market?” or do they ask you if you could tell them about all the listings you’ve currently got on the market?

Tweet about what’s happening in the market. That’s what they want to hear about.

Also, tweeting an inspirational quote from time to time doesn’t hurt either. But once again don’t make it too repetitive. And then from time to time you can tell people about your listings or what’s going on in the office.

If you beat your own drum too much & use the typical interruption marketing that most agents tend to use offline & bring the same approach onto sites like Twitter, Facebook,etc you’ll find that this practice is frowned upon within the social networks & it can take a while to repair your online reputation.

It has been an interesting couple of days.

What has impressed me with twitter is it’s sheer ability to make a difference so quickly. Blogs and Facebook work, but they work more slowly, or at least slower than Twitter which is so instant. Most of the people in the industry are like junkies.. we want the instant hit on everything we do, advertising, emarketing etc etc. They place an ad in on Saturday and they want the phone ringing on Saturday 7am. If calls stop on Monday we don’t even notice because we are on to the next ad.

The concept of investing for the future is foreign to most real estate agents because we want results now. We believe we are all outstanding salespeople so all we need is to speak with the prospect and we can get the business. We think very little of building relationships. Slowly but slowly that attitude is changing.

Twitter on the other hand works in well with the instant hit thinking. Sure you have to build your followers which takes time.. but when you send out a Tweet the results can happen in seconds if not minutes. As a marketing tool that is incredible.

The problem I see for Twitter is exactly what agents should be wary of and thats spam. Do a search on the network for anything people are trying to make money on and the results can be useless because of all the spam. Debt, Travel and those sort of topics.. but also spam is now going after trending topics. Anything that gathers enough eyes is being spammed.

Funnily enough real estate is not heavily spammed at the moment by agents or internet marketers. Thats not to say that there are not agents spewing out posts on every single listing they get.. but there is not enough of them to make it count. I believe if agents choose to directly promote listings on Twitter they should be very selective in how they post Tweets on their listings and choose special or unusual properties. Followers may not take to kindly to it I would think.