Alliance Blog Reviews

Twitter may have began as a simple communication platform for friends and family, but it quickly evolved into an amazingly powerful marketing tool. Arguably, becoming one of the most effective resources for marketing and business professionals alike. One of the really great aspects of Twitter for any professional is the ability to target large amounts of people based on their interests and location. It is this niche/geo targeting that enables “web savvy” real estate agents to reach much larger amounts of prospective clients than ever before. ** Traditional marketing serves as no challenge to a successful Twitter campaign. The Power of Twitter Friends To find success on Twitter you need friends, lots of them. The more people that befriend you the better as it extends your reach each and every time you post a new tweet. Building a substantial amount of friends often requires a physical attempt on your part, unless of course you also happen to be famous. Its important to remember that the more targeted your twitter friends are to real estate and/or your area, the more potential leads you will find. Here are a few tips for finding targeted prospects: Location Search: One of the best things you can do is find friends in and around your local area, after all they are likely the ones that will be buying houses there. For example, a search for Portland Oregon turns up a lot of people that live and work in the Portland area. Industry Search: Search for terms like “real estate,, “real estate agent”, “buying real estate”, you could come up with these for days. Many of these searches will return other real estate agents. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that befriending another real estate agent is a bad thing. Agents refer clients to other agents all of the time, don’t pass on that opportunity. Searching for Related Terms: Search for terms such as “need to move”, “house shopping”, “shopping for a new home”, etc. Admittedly, this type of search tends to be less targeted but can still provide additional exposure and possible clients considering a move to your area. Please note: While the Twitter search bar may not look like much at first glance, it harnesses a tremendous amount of power under the hood. The search tips above are designed to drill down into targeted areas of interest and reach more clients. Twitter Tools for Real Estate Agents There are a number of great tools out there that can increase the power of Twitter and decrease the amount of time and effort required to use Twitter successfully. Some that would be valuable to real estate agents are: Twitter Local : Twitter Local is a pretty neat Adobe Air application that allows you to filter tweets by location. This makes finding potential clients in your area extremely easy. Monitter : Monitter allows you to monitor specific terms and keywords as they are mentioned. This is very powerful to a Twitter marketer and can open up a lot of possible new relationships for real estate agents. Twellow : List your real estate business in Twellow a Yellow Pages type listing directory for Twitter accounts. This is also a great place to find other real estate agents in your area and across the country. TweetLister : TweetLister is a really unique service that makes adding your property listings to Twitter easy! This online service automatically converts your listings to tweets and posts them to Twitter. Pretty neat, huh. Twitter, Another Tool for Real Estate Agents Basically, what it boils down to is that Twitter is a unique platform with a lot of potential for maximizing exposure to your real estate business. As with any tool or service, you have to actually use it to make it work. Nothing happens on its own. The great folks behind Twitter have given you the people and the platform, now its your job to do the sorting and marketing. Have fun with it! © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Twitter for Real Estate Agents – From Tweets to Clients

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Twitter for Real Estate Agents – From Tweets to Clients

2009 cannot be over quick enough for the newspaper business. The year was full of bad news, followed by worse news, which in some cases, ended in business ending news. The prognosis for the future is not real rosy either so what can the reeling industry do? One thing is to erect pay walls but we’ve heard enough on that one. One thing that the industry can do is embrace social media and in particular, Twitter, to get the attention of the digitally inclined. The Bivings Report decided to do conduct an imperfect study of the use of Twitter by the newspaper industry. To their credit The Bivings Report themselves noted that the study was imperfect which shows some considerable integrity and makes their findings of greater interest to someone like myself. Their blog states: …..we decided to closely analyze 300 profiles from the top 100 newspapers in the country as a way of getting a sense, in aggregate, of how the media is utilizing Twitter. Among the things we look at in the study are whether newspapers link to their Twitter accounts from their website, how often and the manner in which the accounts are updated and whether newspapers are using their Twitter profiles to interact with readers or to simply promote their site content. While the study isn’t perfect, the results provide a compelling jumping-off point for additional thought and discussion. So the results are just that: thought provoking. Here is a sample. Only 62% of the newspapers included links to at least one of their accounts from their website – A head scratcher for sure. Why wouldn’t you promote your use of Twitter? 56% of newspapers maintained a directory of their Twitter accounts on their website – Another curious thing since most major newspapers can have several accounts for individual reporters etc. Wouldn’t it make sense to make it easy t find these people. The study noted that the LA Times does a nice job of this . The average account has 3,447 followers if you removed 4 statistical outliers who had over 100,000 followers. Include the outliers and the average jumps to over 17,000 per account. Gotta love statistics! The Twitter profiles of the newspapers send out an average of 11 tweets per day. Tweet frequency varies from 1.1 (The Boston Globe’s Big Picture, The Denver Post’s Woody Paige, and The Akron Beacon Journal) to 95.5 tweets/day (The Boston Herald). 51% of Twitter accounts were updated primarily through Twitter’s web interface. The findings also showed that the interactivity of the newspaper Twitter users was not very high but it also was not completely void. The fear of most is that the newspapers were simply automating tweets but that didn’t appear to be the case. So this certainly shows some areas of hope for newspapers since they seem to be adopting Twitter as a resource to reach potential readers. It also shows that there is a ways to go before the full impact of a service like Twitter may be felt in the newspaper industry. Do you follow any newspapers? Do you care to do so if you are not currently? What would be your expectation of a newspaper’s Twitter feed? Give us your opinions as quickly as possible so we can put the print edition of Marketing Pilgrim to bed. Oh that’s right, we don’t do that. Sorry.

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How Newspapers Use Twitter

Twitter contests can be a great way of getting you or your brand noticed in the Twittersphere. Yes, they can be annoying when everyone is spamming retweets left and right, but who doesn’t love having the chance of winning a Macbook Pro or an LCD TV for 2 seconds of work? Explosive Twitter contest campaigns like the one launched by site builder Moonfruit (@moontweet) rocked the twitter world (the UK company used twitter to give out 10 macbooks over the course of 10 days). In fact, there was even evidence that Twitter censored the #moonfruit hashtag used for the contest because it was getting too popular for its own good! Till this day (months after the contest has been over), people are still adding #moonfruit into their tweets.  Trying to emulate Moonfruit’s success, many other twitter users have launched similar contests. Let’s look at one of them right now: Business phone service provider OnSIP (@onsip) launched their own twitter contest a few hours ago, pledging to give out 2 Netbooks to those who retweeted about the contest. How many more followers have they gotten? I count 5. Not 5000. Not 500. Not 50. Just 5. Wait, are you telling me that only 5 people in the twitter world want a free netbook? That’s pretty hard to swallow… Well if that’s not the case, then what could they have done differently? Here are some suggestions and observations for their twitter campaign and any future twitter contests you may plan on holding. 1) Twitter contests rely on momentum. If you tweet something and its retweeted by active followers who also have active followers, then great–you’re already halfway there. If that’s not the case, then your contest can die extremely quickly, and you’re left in an awkward position wondering what went wrong. If you currently, don’t have a very active twitter follower base, then try to see if you can host your contest on the site of a friend who does have one. On twitter, one really popular tweeter makes all the difference. 2) Recognizable prizes. Moonfruit was a phenomenal success. Why? Well partially because they said they were going to give away 10 Macbooks. Pretty much everyone in the Twitterverse without one wants one. One misstep OnSIP might have committed is the decision to go with netbooks. A lot of the population may still be unfamiliar with the term. If you don’t have the funds to offer such lavish prizes, then I would suggest giving away something else you know your followers will value. For example, discounts or special offers for followers. A lot of contests also pledge to give out a bigger prize once a certain follower count has been reached. For example, @onsip pledges to give away another Netbook if they reach 1000 followers. 3) KISS. No–don’t offer kisses. KISS stands for Keep It Simple Stupid. Don’t make people jump through hoops to enter your contest. Moonfruit’s contest essentially consisted of asking people to follow their twitter, and add “#moonfruit” to their tweets. That’s it. Asking people to tweet you their social security number, mother’s date of birth, and favorite color is a no-no. So there you have it. 3 basic rules to follow. I’m not promising you you’ll get 100000 followers if you do just those things, but at least it will get you started in the right direction. And good luck to @onsip . Right now if you enter their twitter contest , you have around a 40% chance of winning a Netbook. © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Do’s and Don’ts of Twitter Contests — The Moonfruits and the non

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Do’s and Don’ts of Twitter Contests — The Moonfruits and the non

Has anyone seen the new Twitter retweet link? Quick go check under your bed and see if it is hiding there. Because I can’t find it in my Twitter stream: And there’s no news from Twitter about its disappearance. A victory for those that hated the new feature? Or just a glitch?

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Twitter’s Retweet Function Vanishes! Victory for Those that Hate It?

Okay, so hopefully everyone’s gotten used to the new design and layout around here by now! Honestly, we’re really loving it. We did “tone down” the graph paper background a bit, after some feedback from readers that said it was a bit too dizzying. Hope everyone agrees that things look great here now! So this post is to outline the newest way we’re accepting articles from you. A few things have changed, and there have been a few submissions that don’t quite seem to be working properly, so I wanted to put this out there to help out some. First and foremost, if you’d like to submit an article for TwiTip (and see your face “up in lights” on our sidebar and on the post itself) then you need to submit it here: Add A Tip . We’ve got a whole new format now that I think is pretty rockin’. Before, you’d email me your “pitch” and then I’d send you the guidelines, and then you’d write it and submit back. Then I’d have to put the post into the back end, format it (because typically posts would be sent written in Microsoft Word, and that puts really icky code into WordPress), and then post it. Now, you simply go to the form, fill out the fields, and submit! I get notification, and if the post is approved, I do a little font formatting and all is well! The coolest part, is that if you know basic HTML, you can submit your post in HTML. Or you can write it in your own blog editor, and copy the HTML version and paste that in there. That saves even more time, because then all the formatting is done, and I can just read and publish. The whole point of setting up this form this way was so that we could get more content in from you guys, and get it published more quickly than before. So far, it’s been a great tool to have here on the site, and you can consider this the official “Open for Business” invite to submit all your great Twitter related posts! Just keep in mind a few basic things: It cannot be a post you’ve already published elsewhere. We want original content that’s only ever going to appear here. You also shouldn’t plan on, or allow others to publish it on any other site after the fact. Also, don’t submit links to your site, or to your already published post, please. If you have images you want to include, send them to Lara [at] TwiTip [dot] com with the title of your post so I know which one to include it with. The form we’ve got is fantastic, but it doesn’t have image upload capability at the moment. Please make them decent posts. I’ve had a few come through that are basically a paragraph or two that talks about some random Twitter tool no one’s ever heard of (or would care to), or are very basic “6 Reasons To Use Twitter” type things… we’ve got enough of those! Be original and creative. Check through the site to see if we’ve written about, or posted the same type of article before. (If I get another post about HootSuite , I think I’ll scream! ) So there you have it. We’d love some fresh, new tips and posts from you, our dear readers! Oh, and if you have a Twitter related question, feel free to put that in the form as well, and we’ll post it up so other readers can have a chance to help you out! Looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with! © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . TwiTip Call For More Content!

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TwiTip Call For More Content!

When I first started using Twitter earlier in the year, I didn’t really understand #hashtags. As a result, I didn’t utilize them. However, I’ve now started using at least one hashtag in all my tweets and my Twitter experience has improved drastically as a result. Hashtags as Keywords One simple way of thinking of hashtags is as keyword tags that help label your tweets. If you use a blogging platform like WordPress or social media sites like Flickr , you’re probably already familiar with the idea of using keywords to help tag your blog posts or photos. Keyword tags allow people to more easily find related content of interest. This is EXACTLY why you want to use hashtags — more people are likely to find your Twitter account as a result. How Hashtags Help People Find You on Twitter There at least a couple ways that hashtags help people find you on Twitter. The most basic is that in the Twitter interface, hashtags are hyperlinks. When people click a hashtag that interests them, say #twitter, they receive real-time search results of other tweets that have utilized that hashtag. Hashtags are also accessible via various Twitter APIs — there are a plethora of web apps that utilize the Twitter API like foller.me and the Twitter data visualization tool Mentionmap . Hashtags Will Improve Your Twitter Experience Utilizing hashtags not only allows other people to find you on Twitter, but also allows you to find other Twitter users who you many benefit from following. Given that many developers love playing around with the Twitter API, by using hashtags you’re also providing them with raw material to help build the next super-cool Twitter API-based app. These apps also provide yet another avenue for people to find you on Twitter. Twitip has many other neat articles on hashtags that are worth reading. For new Twitter users who may still be a little puzzled by hashtags, my hope is that re-conceptualizing them as keyword tags will help you benefit more from the one of the most interesting and useful social media tools available on the Web today. © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Why You Should Consider Using Hashtags

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Why You Should Consider Using Hashtags

Let’s face it: nobody has the attention span to read more than 140 characters anymore. So WordPress’s latest effort— mobile microblogging cross posting to a regular blog —totally makes sense. Actually, it’s really not a bad shot. Based on an API interface, you can now cross post Twitter updates (with geotagging) to your WordPress account. And really, if all you have to say fits in 140 characters, that’s pretty cool. Of course, this also shows that WordPress’s tech team isn’t too worried about Twitter. And honestly, why should they be? Yeah, Twitter is popular and gets a lot of hype, but really, it serves a different purpose than full-sized blogs. Twitter is great for one-on-one, fast conversations (like public IM, I guess), and for interacting. It’s less great for . . . well, anything that takes more than 140 characters, for one. Interestingly, this capability also lets you read WordPress blogs you’re following—through Twitter. Of course, this uses teasers with links, rather than trying to abbreviate 400-word essays, tutorials or rants into 140 characters. All you need to do this is a Twitter client with custom API support. The official announcement from Matt Mullenweg includes a walkthrough on setting it up on the mobile client Tweetie 2. What do you think? Should WordPress be more worried about competition from Twitter, or is it better to go the all-inclusive route?

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Microblogging, Meet “Megablogging”: Post to WordPress via Twitter