Tweeting for Sales: Tips based on Actual Results

This post summarizes the findings of a comparative research that we conducted over hundreds of “sales tweets” done through the DemandSpot system. Read it to learn how to improve your own results – based on actual facts.

Twitter is fast becoming a tool for business, and accordingly there’s a lot of advice out there, some of it really good. What I couldn’t find however is advice based on a large scale study, rather than anecdotes and good hunches. While I certainly can’t call our study “scientific”, I hope it’s a step in the right direction.

DemandSpot, as some of you may already know, is a tool that lets you search for real estate leads in your area based on their tweets about house hunting (additional markets coming soon…). Once you find leads you can follow them, tweet them a link to your website, or just start a conversation. Once you do, we follow the interactions. We only recently launched this service, but were very lucky to have several hundred real estate professionals use it during the month of August. That put us in a unique position to analyze a large sample of interactions between agents and leads, so we picked a random sample of 500 such interactions and pored over each one in order to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

What we analyzed:

We compared messages that led to further conversation with messages that failed to generate a response. When messages contained links, we compared those that were clicked with those that were not. We tried many variables: the agent’s Twitter profile, the contents of the message, the freshness of the lead and whether the agent followed the lead.

What we found – Tweet-tips for better results:

The single most significant variable is how fresh the lead is. Every day that passes between the tweet saying that the person is house hunting and the agent’s tweet in reply reduces the chance of response by several percentage points. Replies sent within an hour of the original tweet perform the best by far.

This isn’t surprising since older leads are more likely to have already found a house. I also think that it has to do with state of mind – if I’m thinking about my house hunting now, I’m more likely to respond to a message about it. We found that people are generally happy and pleasantly surprised that a stranger had read their tweet and is offering to help.

Now let’s move on to the Twitter profile:

1. A picture’s worth a thousand words: Profiles that use the default Twitter profile picture get no response. Profiles with a personal photo are slightly more successful than those who use a company logo.

2. Complete profiles perform better, so fill in your short bio and location. Most profiles we checked stated clearly in their bio that they are Realtors, but we’ve found no evidence that the actual contents of the bio made a difference.

Next, let’s take a look at message contents:

1. Links work best. Leads are three times more likely to click a link in your message (to your website, your listing, etc.) than to tweet back. For example: “Here’s a cool home search site <your-link>”. We guess that this is because clicking through requires less of an outright commitment. Of course, if you want that click to lead to further engagement, you had better make sure that what’s on the other side of the click is worthwhile…

   (Yes, we can tell if it’s the lead who clicked – not someone else or a bot. I’ll tell you more about this issue in a future post).

2. Call-to-action is very important. This is hard to do in less than 140 characters, but be sure to make it clear what you want the lead to do next. We guess this is another reason that links work – the CTA is “click here”. Another successful strategy is to ask a question, for example: “I have some great listings in KC. How many bedrooms are you looking for?”

3. Lack of context kills many attempts. The nature of Twitter is such that it isn’t clear, like in email, which message you’re replying to. Tweeting “I can help you” sometimes evokes the reply “help me what?” but usually remains unanswered. “I can help you find the perfect home” works better.

4. In the same vein, messages that fail to offer something specific seldom receive a response. “Let me know if I can be of assistance” is inferior to “”I’ve a few houses in Charlotte that you may be interested in seeing: <your-link>”

   Also note how the second example specifically mentions location.

5. Conversational tweets work much better than tweets that read like advertisements. Read your message aloud; If it sounds like a radio spot then you’re advertising, not conversing. For example, compare: “Looking for a new home? Contact John Smith at 555-123-4567 for the best properties.” with: “Hi, how’s the house-hunting progressing? We have an open house next Monday – <your-link> for details”

   Luckily, we had just one user (out of hundreds) who received responses like “quit spamming me!” – not once, but three times. That agent used advert-sounding messages. We’re sensitive about spam, and promptly banned him from using DemandSpot, but more on that in a future blog post.

As a more general guideline, we’ve found that agents who fail to convey a professional image, as a Realtor and a Twitter user, are consistently less successful in getting positive responses. Such failures include:

1. Bad grammar and spelling.

2. Sending messages that are longer than 140 characters. They get truncated and show that you don’t know how to use Twitter.

3. Sending your email address and asking a lead to email you. I guess that people see no reason to converse via email when you’re both already on Twitter.

Finally, a word on following:

We’ve found that some people prefer to continue the conversation with you in private. Follow them and they can get back to you via a direct message.

We’ve also found that some of our users are reluctant to send out messages to lead since they’re afraid to seem too pushy. A follow is a less obtrusive way to connect and alert the lead to your being a Realtor in their area who could offer some house hunting help. It frequently generates a follow-back – which you can see as permission to send a more direct offer, and on a few occasions even prompted the lead to send the Realtor a message first.

For your convenience, we put a short version of these tips here and linked to it from next to the message box on our website.

Happy and successful tweeting 🙂