By If you’ve been using Twitter for some time, incorporating it into your online marketing strategy, you’ve no doubt realized that Twitter is one of those tools that gives back what you put in. Ask two people and you could get one who loves Twitter, says it’s changed her business life, enabled her to network and become smarter at what she does. The other could very well come back and say it was the biggest waste of time.
That’s why I’ve been so keen on highlighting tools that aim to help you make the most of Twitter and other social media tools. One I’ve found most recently is ManageFlitter.
ManageFlitter is really good at just one thing: helping you manage whom you don’t follow on Twitter. Why does this matter? Because if you’re following all the wrong people or (gasp!) empty spam accounts, it can not only clog up your feed with irrelevant noise, it can also influence your reputation.
How? Well, for one, when people decide whether or not to follow you they will inevitably check out whom you follow. If you’re the guy or gal following a bunch of porn spammers or worse, completely inactive Twitterers, then your social reach will be viewed as nil.
Also, your ratio of “followers” to “following” can actually say a lot about you. If you follow many more people than the number who follow you back, then you probably aren’t very influential. Vice versa: if your number of followers far exceeds the number of folks you follow, then you’re likely pretty influential.
Why does this matter? It’s all the sort of details that make up your online reputation. And of course it all comes back to utilizing Twitter in the best and most efficient way possible (i.e., eliminating useless chatter).
What ManageFlitter does is go through your Twitter account and tell you which of the users you follow aren’t following you back, which ones are inactive, who is talkative and who is not talkative. Each of these characteristics can be used to determine whether or not you should continue following someone.
Try it out and see what you can do to improve your Twitter experience. Make your social media efforts work harder for your business!
Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’
Cool Apps: ManageFlitter Helps You Build a Better Twitter
Cool Apps: Measure Your Online Klout
If you’re using Twitter for your real estate business you’re probably constantly wondering whether what you are doing is working. Slow it down even more – how do you even figure out whether your efforts are working?
The end goal of course is always to build business. Twitter is great at helping agents cultivate those relationships and reputation that help to do that. But measuring your success on this platform is more than just counting followers. It’s about social influence.
Enter Klout – a tool that helps you measure social influence on Twitter. And what does social influence have to do with selling real estate? It all comes back to that ever-so-delicate online reputation. You need to build it. You need to maintain it.
Klout gives you insight as to what your influence is within your Twitter network. You may only have 50 followers, but be considered an influencer or thought leader because of the way they interact with you and your content online.
Klout collects data about the content you create, how people interact with that content and the size and composition of their networks. This data helps you to see the impact of your updates, links and recommendations across your network.
Get retweeted a lot? Klout considers that and feeds back influence measurement using that statistic. Or maybe you’re always adding links to your blog posts on Twitter but no one is clicking on them. Klout would consider that as well.
The service creates a Klout Score for users that can range from 0 to 100 with higher scores representing a wider and stronger sphere of influence. Klout uses more than 25 variables to measure three areas it sees as important in calculating influence: True Reach, Amplification Probability and Network Score. True Reach tells you just that – it looks at your engaged followers versus spam bots and dead accounts. Amplification Probability is the likelihood that messages will generate retweets or spark a conversation. Network Score measures the influence of your followers.
You can get your basic Klout score just by entering your Twitter handle at Klout.com.
Once you get a Klout score, you can see what kind of network you have – engaged or not engaged and whether you need to make adjustments like remove some of the spam bot accounts that are following you, or change the way you share articles and other links.
There’s really no point in continuing to spend time on Twitter if you have no idea whether you’re heading in the right direction, building your reputation and increasing your sphere of influence. Give Klout a try and see where you stand.
Cool Apps: A Cure for Social Media Schizophrenia
If you’re out there on the social web communicating, connecting, branding, selling, you’re no doubt on at least a few – if not several – social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare. Manage these networks for a day and you suddenly see the need for an application that can help you pull them altogether like HootSuite or Tweetdeck.
The market for these third-party apps just keeps getting bigger – which is great for agents who may be looking for a good solution to keep it all organized. After all, the goal still is to sell real estate, not to spend all of your time figuring out your online social circles, who’s saying what and who’s responding to your messages and links.
The latest to come out is from Seesmic, which last week released a new version of its Seesmic Desktop application. The new desktop app allows users to log in to more accounts from one dashboard and customize activity through plugins for various other applications.
At launch, the available plugins will enable you to connect with Google Reader, Ning, TwitPic, Salesforce and even Zappos, to name a few. Seesmic also has set up a plugin marketplace where presumably more will be created.
The Seesmic Desktop app is all about customization, which offers users like us a lot of flexibility in terms of what we want to see and do. This enables you to pull in everything you want and get rid of everything you don’t want – making it a sort of “Swiss Army Knife” for social applications. This is really what makes it different from say TweetDeck, which is a great app for pulling in multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, but wouldn’t presently support something like Google Reader for your news feeds.
The key with social media is to try new things, test them and adjust accordingly. But as I mentioned, as real estate agents we really can’t spend the whole day logging into several different sites. The new Seesmic Desktop has a lot of promise to be the one social app you’d need to log into. Let everything else come to you there.
Cool Apps: Kick Some Oomph into Your Social Media
You’ve sat through a few workshops about using social media in real estate. You may already be tweeting, Facebooking, Friendfeeding. You’re digging in, trying new things, seeing what sticks.
By now, you may be realizing that your tweets and updates can get lost online as quickly as a single raindrop disappears into the ocean. You’re thinking: OK, now I’m doing it, but how do I break through all this noise?
This may not be what you want to hear, but how about trying another app? One that allows you to schedule your tweets in advance, track keywords, automatically follow those who follow you. One that helps you make the most of social media while not sacrificing all of your time. See, the thing about social media is that you try, try, try again, but that you also test, see what works, test, see what works, test, see what works.
SocialOomph is an app that can help you organize your social stream. It might be that you’re tweeting the right things, but at the wrong time. Or it might be that your tweets are not connecting to the right conversations – i.e., that the right people aren’t noticing them because they lack hashtags or keywords.
SocialOomph offers a way to get some insight into your twitter activities. It can also help you build your following by auto-following those who follow you, and direct messaging new followers.
The free version allows you to schedule tweets, track keywords and click-throughs, and create an extended profile, among other things. (See the full list of SocialOomph’s free features at the company’s website.)
The professional membership offers, in addition to the free features, the ability to find friends using keywords. You can also find influential followers – which are important as most people agree that it’s better to have fewer followers who are influential than more followers who are not influential. You get automatic spam controls and the ability to bulk upload and schedule a large number of tweets.
So you see – it may seem laborious to use yet another app for your social media outreach, but SocialOomph can really help you get the most of your activities in less amount of time.
Then you can spend more time doing what you love – selling real estate! And hopefully have more clients to work with in the process.
Cool Apps: Get A Handle On The Soc-Med Game with Postling
There are lots of opinions on Social Media and how it can be employed to promote business and engage with our customers. One thing upon which we can all agree, however, is that it can be enormously time-consuming. A time-suck, if you will.
Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. Yelp. FourSquare. YouTube. Tumblr. Flickr. How are we supposed to stay on top of it all and still, you know, do our jobs?
Postling is here to help.
Postling saves you time and frustration. Period. Postling endeavors to help you make social media engagement more efficient. It monitors your presence, and provides you one hub through which you can update your WordPress blog, Facebook fan (or profile) pages, Twitter…you name it. No longer do you need to log into different social media sites every day. Postling does all the work for you. In two simple steps, publish your blog post to your blog(s), then update your Twitter and Facebook status with a link and custom message.
Postling offers unrivaled information curation.
Now partnered with Collecta, Postling will give small businesses a way to track search terms and see its mentions on blogs, in mainstream media, and on social media sites. In addition, they’ve created a custom RSS feed reader, so that you can monitor competitors or blogs that are of interest to you and your business. From Postling, you’ll be able to tweet, comment or post to your blog.
And all of this will happen in real time. Pretty cool, right?
Some of the best features of Postling are the ability to monitor as many different accounts as you like, as well as a great community support feature, to which you can turn for advice when you really need it.
You want to know what people are saying about your business. You want to know what they’re saying right away. Postling will help you listen.
Postling is the tool for small businesses to get a handle on their social media usage. It’s not built for the big boys, it’s built for you and me. Check it out today!
Cool Apps: Put On Your Blogging Jammies … It’s Embed Time
If you’ve ever written a blog post (and c’mon … if you’re reading this, chances are that you have), you know how beneficial it can be to include photos, videos, and yes, the occasional tweet, to help reinforce your overall point.
For the first two examples, videos and photos, embedding in blog posts has always been relatively easy. But with tweets? The process is clunky, at best. Up ’til now, bloggers either had to copy and paste them or, if they wanted even more of a hassle, take screen captures of them (this method preserves the integrity of the quote/tweet perfectly), then post them as images.
As of today, those hassles are things of the past, because Twitter has introduced embeddable Tweets (and there was much rejoicing).
Including tweets, if you’ve never done it, is a great way to quote people and in a way that’s much easier to read and follow than with traditional quoting. With an “old school” quote, the writer would include, usually, a snippet of a quote, which might or might not capture the original context.
With embedding, the inclusion of tweets is neater. It’s cleaner.
From now on, including a tweet will be as easy as including a YouTube video. According to Twitter’s blog there will be, “just a snippet of code you’ll be able to use to generate simple, selectable flat-HTML tweets.” The screen capture below (irony duly noted) shows how an embedded tweet will look:
Embeddable tweets. Not tons of bells and whistles, but darned useful. Your blog posts will be better for them.
Cool Apps: Don’t Be Blue, Get BatchBook!
Each and every day, it seems that there’s a new social media channel on which we need to keep tabs. Whether it’s making professional connections on LinkedIn, managing our personal Facebook profiles, our “fan” pages, Twitter feeds, FourSquare checkins, not to mention email, and the things we use to make sure we’re meeting the needs of our clients, there’s an endless stream of, well…streams to monitor.
How can we do it without sacrificing our work ethic or our commitment to providing the highest quality work to our customers and clients?
BatchBook may just be your answer.
BatchBook, developed by the big thinkers over at BatchBlue Software, features contact management, social media monitoring, email forwarding, communications tracking, to-do lists, the ability to create lists, reports, and Web forms, and integrates seamlessly with Google Contacts, Freshbooks, MailChimp, Shoeboxed, and Zendesk. These features, combined with some of BatchBook’s unique offerings, might make it the most powerful social monitoring/CRM tool around.
First and foremost, BatchBook is a contact management powerhouse. It makes it possible for you to track your business, personal, and social media contacts and share them, if you like, with team members or coworkers. You can create a database from the ground up, or import your contacts from any of several different existing systems. BatchBook has a great feature, which they call “SuperTagging”, which you can use to create custom fields that’ll let you monitor the information that’s important to you, not just those that conform to the software.
Its social media monitoring helps keep the lines between personal and business contacts on social media channels clear. For each of your contacts, you can see their most recent tweets, blog posts, as well as their LinkedIn profile.
Another cool feature is the ability to track communications. If you want to know the last time one of your team members contacted a client, you can see it in BatchBook, whether it was an email or phone call, you’ll have a complete record of all of your communications with your clients. And with BatchBox, your emails can get forwarded directly to BatchBook and attach them to your contact, so you’ll know exactly where you stand at all times.
BatchBook gives you the ability to collect information about your clients and other business-specific information. Not only does it do that, but it gives you an easy-to-use system with customer support that’s second-to-none.
Got the contact management blues? Get BatchBook.
Cool Apps: Know the Real Deal with StatCounter!
Congratulations! You’re in the game! You’ve got a website (maybe several), you’ve got a blog. A Facebook fan page. You name it, you’ve got it.
Sooo, now what?
You update your website. You write blog posts. You post links to Twitter, to your Facebook page, to ActiveRain, not to mention every other place you can think of. Heck, you might even be paying to run an ad or two. How do you know what’s working? How do you know where to focus your attention?
There are some services out there that can give you some basic information, but to get really in-depth, most analytics companies demand a handsome fee. But there is an option.
Welcome to StatCounter.
If your web page has fewer than 250,000 page views per month (and that’s a pretty significant figure), the service is 100% free. FREE! That’s a good thing. But what does it do? The answer is a lot.
Once you include StatCounter’s code in your webpage, it records valuable information about your site’s visitors and records it in a log for you. It tracks information about the sites from which your visitors came, the keywords they used to find you, how long they spent looking at your site, if they’d visited before, where (geographically) they are located, what kind of browser they’re using … and lots more. Once it collects the data, it organizes it and compiles it into charts and lists, so that your analysis is made easier.
If you’ve got more than one site, StatCounter can be used to track those, as well. Oh, yeah! And it’s still free.
You work hard. You spend lots of time making sure that your websites and blogs give just the right impression. Making sure that the sites are doing their jobs and also knowing where to focus your energies is important. If your site’s visitors come mostly from Google, then you don’t want to channel your efforts somewhere else.
In today’s marketplace, a tool like StatCounter is indispensable. If you want to hang tough with the big boys, StatCounter can help you do it!
Cool Apps: Brizzly
By 
Seems like the world can’t get enough of Twitter. The darling of social media, Twitter is monstrously useful for keeping up not only with friends, but developing and honing powerful business relationships and building your personal network. By now, you’re certainly using it. You are, right?
Assuming that you are, at the very least, using the micro-blogging site at least every so often, it’s likely that you have run into difficulties keeping the Twitter feeds of those you follow organized in any way that makes real sense. It’d be nice if there were an answer.
Today, we’d like to introduce you to Brizzly.
Unlike some of the desktop applications that are available, Brizzly keeps things very simple, while offering a ton of useful features. First off, Brizzly is web-based, so you have the ability to keep up with your Twitter minions, no matter your location.
But that’s just the start. Brizzly really sets itself apart from other Twitter clients with its simple, easy-to-use features.
Ever think twice about clicking those links in tweets? You know, the ones that’ve been shortened with services like bit.ly or is.gd and the like? Well, Brizzly takes care of that problem. When viewing tweets on the Brizzly homepage, shortened links are expanded to their original format, so you can see before you click just what you’re in store for. It does something similar with photos and video. If one of your followers includes a link to a photo on Twitpic or yFrog, Brizzly allows you to see the photo in-line. No need to click links at all. The same holds for videos from YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu, or any other video service.
But there’s more!
If there’s someone whom you follow on Twitter who tends to over-share. Or maybe you have a friend who’s attending a conference and is sending updates to Twitter more often than you’d like. For situations like this, Brizzly offers a “mute” feature. With a simple click, you can silence someone’s feed without actually unfollowing them. Then, when you’re ready, simply unmute them and no one (but you) will ever be the wiser.
And the features keep on rolling in! Brizzly treats direct messages like IMs, and threads them together, so you can see a whole conversation. You can also organize those you follow into groups with a couple of simple clicks, so that you can stay on top of the things you care about most.
How to Win Friends and Influence People – on Facebook and Twitter
By Harry Potter aside – I’d guess that many people today would cite Dale Carnegie’s classic book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” as one of the most influential books in their lives. But it was originally published way back in 1951 – when the average home cost $16,000, a gallon of gas cost 27 cents, and “high tech” meant CBS experimenting with color television broadcasts.
How does Dale Carnegie’s classic hold up to today’s Twitter generation? Really well!
The first part of the book focuses on personal relationships – and it is as relevant to Social Media in the 21st century as it is to our in-person relationships today. It recommends-
- Never criticize, condemn or complain. With the Internet- you can rant, rave, and ignite flame-wars more publicly and permanently than ever before. But really. As a consumer – what do you want? One really awesome Palo Alto restaurant recommendation from Yelp! or 15 rotten reviews?
- Become genuinely interested in other people. Carnegie recommends that we remember people’s birthdays and other important details. Today – this is easier than ever. Reconnect with your best friend from third grade, send an instantaneous birthday message via Facebook, join a tribe of left-handed ukele players on Ning. It’s never been easier to add a personal touch to the lives of our friends, family, and colleagues. Carnegie would approve.
- Talk in terms of the other person’s interests. Carnegie was ahead of his time. Focusing on the other people’s interests is the golden rule of Twitter. If he were around today, I doubt you’d find Carnegie only promoting his webinars and ads for acquiring 37,000 followers in 12 minutes on Twitter.
- Be a good listener. So how do you listen on the Internet? Subscribe to blogs & post useful comments and questions. Follow people on Twitter & read their tweets for a bit before jumping in. Respond to requests on Linked-in for recommendations and introductions to help a friend’s job search.
- Make the other person feel important. One of the cool things about the Internet is that you can say “Thanks” in so many ways. You can Retweet on Twitter, you can share someone’s event on Facebook or Linked-in to help them promote it, You can Digg an awesome webpage, and of course –you can say “thanks” directly to the person.
- Use Names whenever possible. In the olden days, a business card only needed space for your name, physical address, and telephone number. Now we squeeze in our fax, email address, Facebook vanity URL, Twitter handle, Linked-in profile, Website address, and Blog address. In bold 4 point font. And still – one of the sweetest things is to have someone personally address something to you with a unique touch so that you know it genuinely comes from them.
- Smile. Positive enthusiastic energy transmits as easily over the Internet as the telephone. We would just need to give Carnegie a dictionary to interpret our sign language. LOL! :0)
Win friends & influence people – in social media and in-person.
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Gino on success
Intero CEO Gino Blefari created the fastest growing company in the history of real estate. Now he's sharing the secrets behind his success.
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Start your week right with a jolt of inspiration from Intero COO Tom Tognoli
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Discover a new tech tool each week - and tips for how to put it to work in your real estate business immediately
