Why Your Community Should Be on Twitter

If your business isn’t on Twitter, you’re missing out on potential high-quality exposure to nearly 10 million users. Here are seven reasons why you can’t ignore Twitter as a valuable marketing tool for your apartment community.

It’s free
Marketing a rental business through the usual avenues — newspaper and magazine ads, TV spots, radio, PPC campaigns — is expensive. So why wouldn’t you get your rental business a free Twitter account? Unlike the aforementioned paid marketing tools, Twitter offers you a lot of bang for your non-existent buck. Not only can your rental business use a Twitter account to reach new customers, but you can also use Twitter to broadcast news, build relationships with other businesses, establish your brand voice, and facilitate customer service. The ROI on a free Twitter account could be incredible.

Everyone else is using it
All the power players in your industry are on Twitter: MSN Real Estate, Remax, Coldwell Banker — the list goes on and on. Since everyone’s doing it — from the biggest names in property management to the guy who owns the shoe repair shop next door — you should be using Twitter as a marketing tool, too.

Street cred
Not only will getting a Twitter account help your rental business leverage a hot, new marketing trend, but your very presence on this social media platform says to potential customers that your property management team and community are “with it.” A Twitter account tells connected consumers that your business is just the kind of forward-thinking outfit that they should be interested in.

The ability to spy
A big part of marketing a successful rental business is watching what your competitors are doing. With a Twitter account, you can easily keep an eye on all of them. Following your competitors is a way to watch how they’re interacting with customers, monitor your competitor’s customer feedback, and help you find out about their promotions.

It’s fast
Another reason you should be using Twitter as a marketing tool is because it’s one of the fastest ways to distribute news about your rental business. A large number of your potential and current tenants are on Twitter, and if you want to let them know about an event, a special deal, or any other relevant information, they’ll get the news instantly when you tweet it.

Don’t underestimate the ability of a 140-character tweet to communicate your most important messages. While today’s consumers might easily delete your email newsletters, tune out your radio ads, or ignore your web site, they’re pretty likely to digest the entirety of a short, sweet tweet. Twitter is a very powerful medium for distributing information.

Better search visibility
In any given city, apartment hunters have hundreds or even thousands of choices when it comes to finding a rental property online. That’s why it’s crucial that your rental business lands among the top spots in the search engines.

Marketing with Twitter can help you achieve better organic search rankings and climb closer to the top of the page on Google or Bing. Why? While the exact algorithm for calculating search rankings is unknown, it’s common knowledge that search engines are starting to take social media activity into account when it comes to ranking web sites. The companies that make a bigger splash in social media – the ones that get a lot of “likes” and are “re-tweeted” — are winning better positions on that coveted first page of search results.

To connect
If you’re still not convinced that your rental business should be on Twitter, then consider the whole point of this incredibly powerful social media tool: to connect people to other people.

When you think about tweeting, you might imagine yourself writing post after post promoting your apartment community’s specials. But what you might not realize is that a Twitter account also lets you engage your customers to get truly useful feedback about your property. Those tidbits of insider information can help you take your business to the next level.

And even more importantly, when you interact with your customers in a personal and positive way, other Tweeters see it. So Twitter’s true value is that it makes your business visible to a wide network of folks — and that’s what every business hopes for from its marketing plan.