Ashton Kutcher became the first member of Twitter to reach 1 million followers by narrowly edging out CNN by less than 1200 followers . There is a great marketing lesson in this epic event that real estate investors should know and understand.

Ashton Kutcher challenged CNN and whoever reached 1 million viewers first would donate 10,000 mosquito nets to the Malaria No More Fund. CNN quickly accepted the challenge and the race was on.

This challenge was a no lose proposition for both CNN and Kutcher because the major national news coverage brought them hundreds of thousands of followers thereby expanding their sphere of influence.

The today Oprah Winfrey with her huge following sent her first tweet live from her show and she already has over 130K new followers in less than a day.This is a huge day in history for twitter and social media and the Oprah show will bring Twitter to millions of people worldwide.

Real estate investors and the rest of the world need to take notice of the power of social media and what it can do for our business. Ashton Kutcher, CNN, and Britney Spears understand the importance of having a large following and Twitter is quickly becoming a media tool and I expect it be one of the fastest growing social media tools of the year.

Understanding Your Twitter Sphere of influence

Let me break down the math for you. Let’s say that Ashton Kutcher has a new movie coming out and to do a little PR for the movie he sends out a tweet to all 1 million of his followers. Your tweet is sent instantaneously.

Let’s assume a conservative 2% click on the link and go to the movie trailer. That’s 20,000 clickthroughs of people interested in his movie because of a tweet and that is assuming a low 2% clickthrough rate.

Gerald Romine’s Thoughts On Twitter

I’m shocked by the number of clowns out there claiming to be social media experts(most often trying to sell you something) but when you look at their social media presence it’s pathetic. One guy even talked about how to get 20K followers almost instantly and didn’t even have a following of 1,000 for himself. No kidding. Now I’m not going to claim to be the best social media guy out there (I’m far from it) but I know my Twitter stats outrank many of the self proclaimed experts(and I only started to get serious with Twitter this year).

Judge The Twitter Results For Yourself:

I’ve had great successes with Twitter and I’ll admit I still have a ways to go. I’m no Oprah Winfrey… but then again I can’t think of anybody that commands a larger audience then Oprah (Hey Oprah… if you’re listening and want to feature my book on your show I think I can fit you in!)

With social media you can quickly develop a presence even if you are new and just starting out.

Understanding Twitter

Twitter is in the mainstream but most real estate investors do not really understand what Twitter is all about. Realize there are many different types of people on Twitter but the single largest reason people use Twitter is to connect with other people – hence “social media”.

Twitter is not email. Twitter is not blogging. Twitter can best be described as text messaging for your computer and it gives you speed to communicate quickly with everyone… even from your cell phone if you can’t tweet enough online.

With that in mind I’m going to give you some tips and techniques for using and building a Twitter account. Everything I’m going to share can be done without spending one cent. However, as you grow your Twitter account you may want to consider purchasing useful tools that make things easier to manage but when you are starting out just do the free things.

Gerald Romine’s Simple Twitter Success Rules

1. Using Twitter is a MUST

I, at first, didn’t use Twitter because this was my hang up. I just did not want to invest the time to start using Twitter but once you get started it’s really not that bad. By spending a little time with Twitter daily, you’ll find the key to your Twitter succes. This means you need to follow people, tweet, and go back and forth with DM’s. My personal recommendation is about 30 minutes a day.

2. Customization of Your Profile On Twitter

Twitter is defined as a social medium and people will check out your profile to find commonalities. The default Twitter profile consists of your NAME, LOCATION, WEB ADDRESS and a short BIO. Twitter does not give you a lot of room in your bio so be sure list your website or Facebook page so people can learn more about you.

Don’t stop at that… the very successful Tweeters will take the extra steps to create a designed background and customize their page. My page can be viewed at www.Twitter .com/geraldromine. To change your background image login to Twitter then click on SETTINGS, DESIGN, CHANGE BACKGROUND IMAGE and upload the image of your choice. My image size is 1566 X 950 (you can create your own image or hire somebody from craigslist or Elance to create the image for a few dollars).

3. Tweeting Successfully

If you are new to Twitter you must learn a new vocabulary. Sending a message to everybody is a TWEET. A Direct Message (DM) is sending your message to a single friend. Everything you do on Twitter can bee seen by others which will give you quite the audience with which to share what you have to say. Don’t make the mistake of thinking a DM is private and saying something stupid… it will come back to bite you in the arse.

To tweet or not to tweet? That depends on you and why you are on Twitter. Some go back and forth like school girls and while that’s fine, it’s not a great idea because your followers will be bored to death. Im not one to tweet about the small things because that's not how I do things. My most common tweets are real estate tips, motivational quotes, and a few self serving business tweets.

4. Don’t Sell and TWEET Hard

Twitter is social medial and you if you are going to be successful do NOT constantly broadcas commercial tweets. It is alright to tweet a few self-promoting tweets, however this should be done relatively softly and not often.

Putting out useful content and info you can build more and more followers. If you think it is a 24 hour home shopping network for your commercials then you completely misunderstand the purpose of Twitter. Most people follow you because you have something useful to say, but if you spam them you’ll quickly find you have fewer followers.

5. Understanding Twitter Advanced Searches

There are several good Twitter search tools and we’re going to talk about using Twitter’s very own http://search.Twitter .com/advanced to find tweets with specific information contained in the tweets. Let’s say you wanted to find other real estate investors (potential buyers, etc) for real estate in your area. Using the Twitter Advanced Search tool you could search for THIS EXACT PHRASE “real estate” then under PLACES search for your city or state “Phoenix”.

And presto, you’ve found people tweeting about real estate in your area. From there you can follow them and send a DM to start building your list of followers and increasing your sphere of influence.

Do you think these people might have friends and followers interested in the same things you are? All that is needed is to click on their followers, follow them, and start connecting with more Tweeters.

That wasn’t so bad was it.

Most of my Twitter success is attributed to a good friend of mine who was nice enough to share with me tips and resources needed for Twitter success. In the near future I’ll be interviewing him. If you’d like to hear the interview sign up for my newsletter at www.kickassrealesate.com.

Author: Gerald Romine

About The Author:

Gerald Romine is a nationally recognized real estate expert that has been featured across North America sharing the stage with political leaders, film stars, and business leaders. Since 1989, Gerald has been involved with real estate as a real estate agent, broker, rehabber, investor, and builder and has been involved with everything from houses to apartments. For more information about Gerald’s products or services visit www.kickassrealestate.com