Has social media been working for you or working you this year? Social media platforms can bring tremendous success for your property, but the challenge lies in crafting an effective strategy. Whether you’re completely new to social or just want an added boost to your existing strategy, we have you covered. Incorporate these five tips to help supercharge your social media marketing this year, and let it finally work for you.
1. Use those hashtags.
As trendy as they may seem, hashtags serve a functional purpose in your social media marketing strategy. When incorporated into your post, hashtags have the potential to help others find you quickly and allow you to engage in and/or contribute to online conversations and topics. When determining which hashtags to use, you should first create your own branded version that includes your property name. This particular hashtag should be pretty standard and used in all of your posts indefinitely. If you decide to run a campaign or host a particular event, you should also create a specific and unique hashtag for these as well and encourage your residents to utilize them.
Before you begin to create specific hashtags, make sure you perform a quick usage check in advance to ensure yours remains unique. The exception to this rule would be if you’re contributing to an already trending hashtag. There are several hashtag tools online that can help you pick the most relevant phrases for your posts and help track their progress.
2. Engage, engage, engage!
The whole premise behind social media is to actually get social! You cannot expect users to engage with your posts if you’re not engaging others too. When users share your posts or comments, make sure you thank them in return. Not only will they be more inclined to “like” your posts as a returned favor, but it shows that you are active, present, and actually care about your community of followers. Another strategy to drive engagement is to ask for feedback on your posts. In addition to gaining insight, you have the potential to gain invested renters or prospects that will likely transition to leads.
3. Don’t skip on the visuals.
Like it or not, we are quite visually-receptive creatures. In fact, our brain only requires 1/10 of a second to understand an image. To put this into perspective, reading approximately 200 words takes a minute on average. As you could probably imagine, content that includes visual imagery tends to generate more than 90% views, shares, and comments than posts without images. When choosing your social visuals, make sure you experiment with a variety of image types and formats, like infographics, screenshots, checklists, and illustrations. Be mindful of copyright rules, and optimize your visuals for SEO by incorporating keywords and image descriptions.
4. Jump on the meme trend.
Remember that infamous Bernie Sanders inauguration mitten meme that practically broke the internet? Believe it or not, as laughable as they may seem, memes can actually offer practical benefits for your social media strategy. These low-cost images help foster a sense of community and relatability among your users. They influence sharing across platforms, which results in you reaching a wider audience base and higher visibility. And, incorporating memes humanizes your overall brand, thanks to their humor and modern and authentic appeal. When selecting your meme, you’ll want to make sure it really is consistent with the nature of your brand/community and doesn’t miss the mark on tone. Try to avoid making a sales pitch from the meme and, instead, focus on authenticity, edginess, and relatability.
5. Post frequently.
Look, you’ve heard this many times before–consistency is key. While it may be difficult to crank out those posts on some days, you’ll want to push through and post relatable content multiple times per week. Your posts should continue to engage your base and encourage them to remain followers, interact and react. After all, the main point of social media is to “get social!”
Rentbot can help.
You can’t ace your social media marketing strategy without first having a functional and robust website. That’s where we come in. Our websites are designed to save you time and money on the back-end while providing your users with a professionally optimized and attractive platform that they will appreciate on the front-end. Our mobile-friendly designs will ensure your site looks great on any device, and with our conversion-optimized layouts, once quality tenants find you, the site design will automatically drive them to contact you for a tour. And, with real-time availability, you can link your inventory directly from your social posts so that prospects can see exactly which apartments they can call home. Want to learn more? Schedule a brief consultation with a Rentbot professional, and we’ll set you up with a free 30-day trial.
About the Author
Jonsette Calloway joined the Rentbot team in 2015. With a background in public relations, advertising, and copywriting, she has helped a multitude of clients achieve their marketing and communications goals within various fields, but she particularly enjoys working with the apartment industry.