6 Degrees GroupNew Media for Real Estate Communities & Hospitality

Twitter was created in 2006 by Jack Dorsey and in November, 2009 had 22,481,568 unique visits (according to compete.com). Twitters credibility has increased dramatically as it recently struck deals with Bing (Microsoft’s search engine) as well as Google to provide real time search feeds benefiting all brands that create accounts.

10 unique Twitter features that we find compelling, yet often overlooked are listed below:

1. Favorites - Twitter allows users the ability to star favorite tweets. They can be your own tweets or others that you have enjoyed and re-tweeted. 6 Degrees Group uses this feature to “bookmark” our favorite highlights of a community so that readers can easily get a sense of the community’s features and market position without skimming through the news feed.

2. Lists – 9/30/09 Twitter announced that they would be adding a new feature – the list. This feature allows you to organize your followers or who you follow by grouping them into categories. Not only does this help industry partners easily locate other professionals, but it gives special recognition to those placed on the list.

6 Degrees Group uses lists in 2 ways: 1. We group local business and area attractions specific to each of our client communities (restaurants, wine bars, music and art venues, events, etc…) 2. We list local real estate professionals that take an interest in our communities by following along. This enables potential buyers to easily locate agents that are condo/loft/multifamily/leasing or area specialists. We look at this list feature as a way to show our appreciation and have termed it our long-term “Follow Friday”.

3. Website link icon - The icon link is often an overlooked marketing feature. Every community that has a Twitter feed should not only have a link to its website, blog or Facebook page on its Twitter page, but in turn these pages should contain a link back to Twitter. 6 Degrees Group always recommends that your community webpage and all eblasts contain a readily available icon for interested parties to click to read the latest real-time announcements from your community. This also helps your linkability and SEO campaign.

4. Location - Would you create a webpage without listing your location? It is important to list your location on your Twitter account as well. Real Estate is location sensitive. Someone with an interest in a San Francisco high-rise, leasing community or hotel may not be interested in one in Seattle.

5. Relevancy - Relevancy matters. Everyone wants to be the popular kid in school and have the most friends, however isn’t it best to have a handful of really great friends, rather than a roomful that don’t really “get you”? Simply put “who” matters more than “how many”.  If someone who is relevant to your location or profession follows you, you have the opportunity to follow back. This can be a strong networking tool and just as in “real-life” you never know when you will be meeting this person face-to-face, if they are a source for referrals, if you have mutual friends or will be in need of their assistance in the future.  A follow can strengthen not only your knowledge, but your network as well.

6. Video links - Links to videos can be attached as URL links in your Tweets. Services that allow you to shorten your URLs and track them are powerful for measuring click throughs. Video is continuing to grow and develop as higher broadband speeds become more widespread. Younger audiences are leaning toward a preference for multimedia and its popularity is growing. 6 Degrees Group likes using VR video, interview and testimonial links specific to a particular community in our Tweets.

7. Twitpics – Twitpic allows you to share photos on Twitter.  An online photo album is created for your brand that allows you to upload and distribute photos in near real-time. 6 Degrees Group uses Twipics in community tweets to announce a new phase, model home or show off an event. Often we also include Twitter links to a community Flickr account embedded with keywords to reinforce the visual campaign.

8. Re-tweets Marker – Recently, Twitter introduced a new Re-tweets link that contains a 3 tabbed history with categories listed as (1) Re-tweets by others, (2) Re-tweets by you and (3) Your tweets, re-tweeted. This new feature easily allows tracking of brand mentions and forwards – allowing you more quantifiable measures of success. It also allows you to get to know the interests of those you follow and those that follow you more intimately by offering greater market insight -increasing your ability for quality content, customer service and co-promotion/endorsement opportunities. Additionally, it is a tool to find relevant people/brands to follow and followers – increasing your capability to create quality connections with Industry Leaders/Broker/Agents. The only negative we find is that many on Twitter use outside applications like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, etc… and are not apt to use this hard copy re-tweet feature, thereby decreasing the reliability of its trackable component.

9. RSS Subscription - Twitter truly is a microblog.  Twitter brand pages are often updated more frequently than a blog.  There is less room for journalistic editorial and creativity - it must be written in 140 characters or less.  The subject matter is almost always relevant to the product because tweets must remain concise (aside from links).  This is great for both organic SEO and busy professionals that are not able or do not prefer to spend a lot of time reading your community blog. An RSS feed is featured on Twitter pages where readers can subscribe to all updates. Subscribers receive updated information from the feed that is automatically downloaded to their computer and can be viewed in at their leisure.

10. Hashtags - Hashtags allow us to label our tweets. Multiple tweets with the same label can be searched and grouped. 6 Degrees Group adds hashtags to particular twitter posts or themes (promotions), as we would keywords.  This enables us to create a listing of each time that post is re-tweeted or referenced.

6 Degrees Group New Media for New Home Real Estate Developments, Leasing Communities, Resort Properties & Hospitality