The Pope tweets. President Barack Obama tweets and hosts town hall meetings on Twitter. Lots of CEOs tweet, from Virgin’s Richard Branson to Zappos’ Tony Hsieh. In fact, so many C-levels tweet that one CRE industry expert recently called the platform “the new country club.”

Given the popularity of Twitter – as well as the high-level company it keeps – it remains surprising to hear some real estate executives decline to participate in social media. They reject it not because they are risk-averse but because they do not believe social media is relevant to their industry or worth their time.

Yet, as Hubspot reported in its 2011 State of Inbound Marketing report, companies that use Twitter average more than two times the amount of leads per month than companies that don’t use Twitter. The report also revealed that blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter generated leads and led to new clients/customers for half of the businesses surveyed. Still think social media is not relevant or worthy?

While much of the real estate business remains high-touch and based on personal relationships between bankers, developers, brokers, owners and tenants, social media should not be ignored as part of an overall communications strategy. Social media, as the name indicates, relies on interaction. Face-to-face meetings are crucial to business, yet these tools can foster new relationships as well as nurture existing ones.

E-Mail Passé?

We all know that it’s what happens after the meeting that really counts. In the years of “Mad Men,” it involved strong drinks and smoky bars. In the past two decades, meetings were followed up by courteous emails. Today, it’s “Facebook me,” or “See you on LinkedIn.” In 2010, we spent triple the amount of time on social networks than on email, according to the Nielsen Company. Email is becoming as vintage as brandy with the boys.

The biggest benefit of social media is that everybody is on it. A lot. The 2011 edition of eMarketer proclaimed that nearly two-thirds of American internet users regularly use social media. That means many of your prospective and current clients are on it right now. Many of your employees are on it, though obviously not while you’re paying them. Even your competitors are likely to be on it. They’re all on various networks sharing news, nurturing ideas, making connections, and touring properties via YouTube while you’re reading this. Do you know what they’re saying? Do you have something to say – or show – to them? Social media is an easy way to reach all of your key audiences in a more human and direct way.

Direct Connection

Think of a crisis situation. A mysterious white powder in one of your buildings, a major tenant pulling out, a foreclosure. To best protect your brand in such circumstances, you would communicate with key audiences through a medium that doesn’t interfere with the message. Social media is just that: a way to connect directly. You can tell your story without hindrance and you can tell it before anyone reads it from another source.

However, building social media channels to key audiences takes time. You cannot expect to start social media during a crisis and have it be as effective as if you already had an established presence. Plus, if you have social media in place, you can monitor all the channels where chatter happens – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs – and often catch a developing crisis before it explodes.

If you’re still unsure of the value of social media, you must at least recognize the importance of a good website. Prospective partners, clients and employees will likely find you online and judge you by your site before making a decision to work with you. Can they find you with a Google search? Seventy-five percent of users never scroll past the first page of search results. Social media can drastically improve a website’s ranking. According to Hubspot, companies that blog have 97 percent more inbound links, and B2B companies that blog have 55 percent more website visitors and generate 67 percent more leads per month than those who do not. As they say, “If Google can’t find you, neither will anyone else.”

Whether to improve the visibility of your website, prepare for or prevent a crisis, or simply engage the people you need to connect with in the high-touch commercial real estate world, social media is the tool you need. Every other industry is on board. It’s time we also began shifting from dated communications to the modern medium.

Tina Cassidy is a former Boston Globe reporter and editor and vice president at Solomon McCown & Co., Boston.