What Does the Twitter IPO Mean for You?

by Sue Koch

November 07, 2013

On Wednesday, Nov. 6, Twitter announced, via Twitter of course, their IPO price of $26 a share. What does this mean for you?

Well, unless you are trying to make an investment decision, you may think it has no bearing on you whatsoever. But consider the numbers:

Twitter has 200 million active users.
80 percent of those users are accessing their account on a mobile device.
The 2013 NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers indicates 92 percent of people use the Internet as a research tool in the home buying process.
89 percent of Realtors indicate using social media in some capacity for marketing or research.

You can be certain there are leads to be found on Twitter.

How can you adjust your strategy to see benefit from the Twitter IPO? Consider how they must up now up their game. Twitter’s growth in revenue figures will depend on success in advertising.

Yes, the first reaction is that of a deep sigh, looking forward to a future of more promoted tweets in your feed you don’t care about. Shift to a proactive use that will benefit your strategy.

Tactic 1: Market Research – Many Realtors already use Twitter as a key tool in social search, identifying leads by location and hashtag searches. Keep an eye on those promoted trends that may facilitate more insight into your target market, or allow you to join in on a featured conversation with relevance.

Tactic 2: Advertise your Brand – Historically, Twitter stats have shown that a promoted Tweet is actually less likely to be clicked on. However, the impending boost in advertising Twitter will need to introduce will likely make promoted posts a more common appearance. Figure some test ads into your budget and see how they fare in comparison to ads on other social channels.

Tactic 3: Rich Media – Twitter is planning ahead, and in October it already introduced the ability to feature rich media in a more “Facebook Like” fashion in the newsfeed. What does this mean? You can creatively use photo and video in your promoted Tweets to give the user more enticement to interact, as they will see it directly in their Twitter feed.

Tactic 4: Leverage Your Data – Many users don’t realize that Twitter introduced a data rich analytics feature recently, which can be found at www.ads.twitter.com. You do not need to advertise to use this, simply connect your Twitter login to this advertising account.

Should you decide to advertise to get more momentum out of Twitter post-IPO, you’ll find many ways to measure demographics, audience interaction, interests of your audience and how well your promoted Tweets are doing.

Sue Koch is the chief navigator for Soaring Solutions, LLC. She can be reached at: