Is Twitter Good for Real Estate Agents?

Twitter almost doesn’t need an introduction. 

And since it’s a well-known social media platform, you might have wondered whether it is good or good enough for your industry as a real estate agent.

When generating leads, Twitter is good enough as long as you focus on Twitter’s paid ads platform. There, you can bank on a cost per sale of $422.

The situation is quite different when you want to use it to generate leads by first building an organic reach with many followers.

In this article, I will first discuss what Twitter is and its current statistics. Then I’ll do some marketing math to compare the organic Twitter follower route with the paid ads one.

 

What it is and What the Twitter Statistics Are Saying

Twitter is a blogging platform that allows you to post so-called “tweets” with a limit of 280 characters. This is also called “microblogging.” 

You can also use pictures and videos and text-based posts (tweets).

If Twitter users have exciting and engaging content to offer, other users can follow them. 

Once you follow other users, you will see what they posted on your ‘timeline.’ So, the principle is similar to Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms. 

You follow someone and see more or less what they post on your timeline.

In contrast, Facebook is inconsistent in this regard since organic reach has been dropping over the last few years.

If you like a tweet that you see on your timeline, you can repost – or, in Twitter language, “retweet” it.

Now, let’s look at Twitter Statistics as the first step to answering whether Twitter is good for real estate.

 

Twitter Statistics

• There are more than 1.3 Billion Twitter accounts (source) and 152 million active daily users on Twitter (source).
• Regarding discovery, Twitter is the number one platform to help users discover what’s new (source).
• There are 56% male and 44% female users on Twitter in the U.S. (source).
• 38% of Twitter users are between 18 and 29, and 26% are between 20 and 49 (source).
• US Twitter users have a college degree in 42% of the cases (source).
• Twitter users spend 26% more time viewing ads than on other platforms (source).
• The site referral traffic from Twitter has grown by 6% over the years (source).
• Using hashtags in your tweets gives you 100% more engagement (source).
• If you read my article about videos in real estate, you won’t be surprised that tweets with videos get 10x more engagement (source).
• Using images in your tweets can get 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites, and 150% more retweets (source).
• If you also use video in Twitter ads, they will be 50% cheaper in costs per engagement (source).
• Way more than half of Twitter users (80%) access Twitter from their mobile phones (source), and even more so (93%) watch videos posted on Twitter from these devices.
• The average cost per click for Twitter ADs is $0.38 (source), and the average conversion rate is reportedly 0.9% (source).
• Paid ads from Twitter convert twice as many visitors as organic tweets (source). This would mean a conversion rate of 0.45% for organic tweets based on the number above.
• The average click-through rate (CTR) on Twitter is 1.64%, and, unfortunately, the more followers you have, the lower your click-through rate (source).
• If you have between 50 and 1000 followers, you can get a CTR of 6.16%; between 1,000 and 5,000 followers, it is 1.45%; between 5,000 and 10,000, it is 0.55%; and for more than 10,000, it is 0.45% (source).
• The ideal posting frequency on Twitter is five times daily (source).
• Paying for followers with a Twitter follower campaign costs between $2.50 and $4 per follower (source).
• Based on user reporting, it can take one year to get from 0 to 2000 followers (source). Getting to 10,000 followers may take even more than five years if we consider saturation.

 

Let’s Do Some Marketing Math to Find Out about Twitter’s Worth for Real Estate Agents

With the above information, we have a good basis to further determine Twitter’s worth for real estate marketing.

This is the primary data we use in the estimation calculation:

• Average cost per click for Twitter Ads: $0.38
• Average conversion rate (leads) for Twitter Ads: 0.9%
• Average conversion rate (leads) for Organic Tweets: 0.45%
• Average overall click-through rate (CTR): 1.64%
• The click-through rate for 50-1,000 followers: 6.16%
• The click-through rate for 1,000-5,000 followers: 1.45%
• The click-through rate for 5,000-10,000 followers: 0.55%
• The click-through rate for more than 10,000 followers: is 0.45%
• The average cost per follower with Twitter follower campaigns: is $3.25
• Optimistically, you can gain 2000 followers per year, posting five times daily and engaging otherwise.

This was a mouthful.

What can we now do with this basic data?

Let’s establish a marketing goal, as I already discussed in this article about real estate marketing plans.

I will use the same numbers for our hypothetical goal from there:

• Annual profit goal (after corporate taxes of 21%): $150,000
• Annual revenue goal: $189,873
• Monthly revenue goal: $15,822
• The commission per $320,000 median home (3%): $9,600
• Necessary homes to sell per month: ~2
• Assumed lead to sales conversion rate (depends highly on your follow-up/sales skills): 10%
• Necessary buyer leads per month: 20 (2 divided by 10%)

Okay, let’s just focus on the 20 monthly buyer leads and the assumed 10% lead-to-sales conversion rate, which depends largely on your follow-up and sales skills.

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The Calculation for the Organic Twitter Route

We take the content marketing-based organic Twitter follower route for the first calculation. 

As the average traffic-to-lead conversion rate for organic tweets is 0.45%, you would need 4,444 clicks per month (20 divided by 0.45%) to generate this number of leads. 

Now, let’s calculate how many followers you need that see your tweets and generate 4,444 clicks per month, considering that the average overall click-through rate is 1.64%. 

This number would be 270,975 views per month.

I had to double-check this number because I was shocked about it. 

So please let me know if you found an error in my calculation or have better basic statistics to make this calculation look a bit better. (I want it to look better).

Until then, 270,975 views (followers) means many eyeballs viewing your tweets. 

Remember, this was for the average 1.64% click-through rate I applied.

The picture looks even worse since accounts with more than 10,000 followers only get a CTR of 0.45%. 

And by looking at these numbers, I would conclude that the organic route isn’t feasible.

Getting a Twitter account from 0 to 270,975 followers (unless you are already a celebrity or already quite advanced because you started getting followers right in the beginning stages of Twitter) may take you 135 years (270,975 divided by 2000 followers).

This is if you grow it by 2000 real followers (not bots) per year. 

This amount of time is likely above your life expectancy and the one of Twitter itself. 

Even if you gain 10,000 followers annually, it would still take 27 years to get to 270,975.

You don’t want to wait that long to attain your profit goals.

So this doesn’t look too good. And I didn’t even factor in the actual costs per acquisition or sale.

You would have to also consider all the hours of content, Twitter engagements, and more that you would have to invest to gain those followers.

It may look better if your lead-to-customer conversion rate is much higher, such as maybe 50%. 

But even such an impressive number likely won’t cut it. Using this scenario would be a bit too utopic for this calculation. 

I prefer to stay as close to reality as possible.

 

The Calculation for the Paid Ads Twitter Route

Let’s check now how the picture paints with the paid ads Twitter route.

To achieve the revenue/profit goal from above, we still need our 20 buyer leads per month.

According to the above statistics, you will have a better conversion rate of 0.9% with paid Twitter ads. 

Applying the 10% lead to sales conversion rate, your traffic to sales conversion rate would be 0.09% (0.9% x 10%).

We also know from the above that the average cost per click for Twitter ads is $0.38.

Applying the newly calculated 0.09% traffic to the sales conversion rate, you will need to buy 1,111 clicks per sale. 

So, your costs per sale will be $422.

With a commission of $9600 per sale, not factoring in other costs, you would profit.

So, this paid scenario doesn’t look too bad, provided you have the capital to spend on Twitter ads.

Compared to other Ad Platforms such as Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Facebook Ads, only the costs per sale of Google Ads seem to be higher at $957.

In my article about LinkedIn, I already compared the costs per sale of these platforms. Still, I will provide them to you again below in a table.

I also include the estimated costs per sale for real estate on Twitter:

 

What Can Be Concluded After These Calculations?

Don’t bother that much with generating a huge following on Twitter for your real estate business.

I would instead focus on using the Ads platform to generate leads.

If you use this route, I would say that Twitter is good enough for your real estate business to generate profitable leads.

Still, there are several benefits to using Twitter, not for the sole purpose of generating leads. 

Therefore, I will give you the overall Pros and Cons in the next section.