On Saturday afternoon, I was pretty much lazing around on my laptop and watching TV with no plans for anything cooler than that. On Saturday night, I went to Ultimate Fighting Championship at the O2 Centre in London with the CEO and COO of Zappos.com, partied with fighters and sponsors and eventually ended up in Mo*Vida for Mike Bisping’s after party. I had an amazing night and I have a strange source to thank…Twitter.
By now most people have heard of Twitter, whether or not they use it or think it has any use for them is a different story. I love fads (I have the slinkies and pogs to prove it) but after two weeks of tweeting I can say that Twitter has firmly gained a nesting place in my heart. And that’s despite all the downtime that the site has been having. In fact, I’ve never known such a temperamental product to have quite such a following. But that’s because it becomes like that friend you have who always forgets where you were meeting up, lets you down at the last minute and flirts with your girlfriend. Twitter can be a jerk, but over all it’s pretty great.
I first tweeted on May 22nd, some nonsense about eBay, then I went quiet for a few days. I gradually started tweeting more and more, realising that although no-one’s really listening in the early days you just have to keep tweeting to ever get into it. And that has to be my first piece of advice, follow people and keep tweeting. You don’t want to tweet incessantly, just don’t feel disheartened when you see someone with 6000 followers compared to your 3 (brother, colleague, random stranger).
At time of going to (word)press I’m ‘following’ 209 twitterers (or twits as Robin calls them) and being followed by 64, that’s after two and a bit weeks and no promotion of my Twitter feed outside of Twitter. And I must mention, I have no offline friends using it.
I started following a lot of people by searching various real estate terms and finding who other property bloggers follow. There’s no search functionality for tweet history on the main Twitter site but you can use Tweet Scan to do the job nicely, I looked for people who had tweeted about Zoomf for example and started to follow them. It’s all unspeakably easy to get the hang of. Using it successfully as a property professional is not so easy, and I promise I’ll be discussing that on the blog over the next couple of days.
Have I had any Twitter success since I got my wings? Well, in the short time I’ve been using it the Zoomf Blog has had record weekend traffic, and I can see from Analytics that this is all due to referring links from Twitter. And of course I got to have an amazing night with Tony and Alfred from Zappos as mentioned earlier (and continuously in the office just to make the boys jealous).
I really recommend you give it a go and also that you stay tuned here to find out what the real estate industry can learn from Zappos and how you can use Twitter to it’s best potential.
Oh, and go follow me!
Mario Yamasaki, Tony Hsieh and my good self…all thanks to Twitter! More pics here.
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