Twitter is one of the largest social media websites with 313 million active monthly users. It’s also one of the best social media platforms for engaging with people and potential customers.

Here are 5 tips to get more out of your Twitter marketing.

Keep it unique and personal

When you’re sharing valuable content on Twitter it’s best to keep your own unique style and voice instead of trying to mimic other popular marketing gurus or realtors.

When you put together all of your various tweets make sure they match your own personality and brand.

As Mari Smith told Social Media Examiner, “Ideally you want people to read your tweets and feel naturally compelled to click on your links and retweet you. You just want to add value and have no agenda or attachment to “making the sale,” yet you’re strategic and mindful about how you tweet. Then you’ll see a marked improvement in your retweet and click-through rates.”

Your own unique personality is the best way you can distinguish yourself and stand out from the crowd on Twitter.

Engage with your audience

It’s much easier to just put all your social media on autopilot and many people still use Twitter as another platform to push out promotional content.

Both of these are big mistakes.

It’s much better to use your Twitter account to provide value and help to your followers. You’ll receive much more attention by sharing articles of interest, discussing important issues in the real estate industry and helping your clients.

As Gary Vaynerchuk wrote in his book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, social media is more about providing a constant stream of value for your customers (jabs) and then occasionally once you’ve earned their trust and permission you can hit them with a promotional massage (the right hook).

Constantly pushing out promotional messages is not going to help you build relationships with your followers.

Be transparent

If you make a mistake admit it and apologize. If you don’t know the answer to a question a follower asks tell them you don’t know and maybe refer them to someone who might.

The more honest and transparent you are the more you build your credibility and trustworthiness.

If you try to cover up mistakes or lie then that’s the quickest way to lose the respect and trust of your followers.

Everything on the Internet is there forever and if you try to delete tweets or cover up mistakes people will find out and it will hurt you much more in the long run than owning up to it.

Curate and share interesting content

There’s a huge amount of great content getting added to the Internet every day. By sharing a mixture of your own content and quality, relevant content from other trusted sources you can greatly increase your credibility as well as provide value for your followers.

By sharing content from other thought leaders you can also piggyback off their work as your tweets will show up when people search for their names.

Engagement is better than exposure

There are lots of ways to get your tweets in front of more people. One of the easiest and most popular ways is by using trending hashtags.

The problem is most of these people don’t care and adding things like trending hashtags are distracting.

Your goals on Twitter should be to build your online reputation and get traffic to your website to convert into leads.

You’re going to achieve both these goals much better by engaging with the people who care about what you have to say and building trust and permission with them rather than trying to get your tweets in front of people who don’t care about what you have to offer.

For more on this idea check out the excellent article 1,000 True Fans. Building a community of people who care about what you have to say may take more time but in the long run it’ll be way better for your business than just sending out tweets to as many people as possible.