Your apartment’s online reputation is always important. But with leasing season upon us and millions of renters looking for new places to live, it’s more important than ever. To make sure your community looks as good as possible online, here are some quick tips to monitoring and protecting your reputation.
Track Reviews
Tracking reviews is the first step in protecting your online image. After all, you can’t properly handle how you’re portrayed online if you don’t know what’s being said about you in the first place. Luckily, it’s incredibly easy to track what’s being said about your community without manually checking the Internet’s infinite review sites five times each day. Tools like the Respage Dashboard can handle that task for you, sending notifications whenever your community’s name is mentioned on popular apartment review sites. This automated process is a game changer, saving you countless hours while making sure you don’t miss a thing.
Respond to Reviews – Good and Bad
Knowing what’s being said about your property online is one thing. Responding to what’s being said about your community is something else entirely. And as if things weren’t complicated enough, there are a lot of misconceptions about the proper way to tackle review response. One of the most popular misconceptions about the process, for example, is that you should ignore negative online reviews. This is a terrible strategy in practice. It gives review readers the impression that you don’t care about the concerns of residents. Furthermore, it means you’re essentially forfeiting an opportunity to tell your side of the story. And if the events outlined in the review don’t align with reality, you want to (politely) make that known. Another misconception is that some reviews are so short that they don’t warrant a response, but that’s just silly. All reviews, good or bad, long or short, warrant a response. Responding to reviews shows you care about the thoughts and concerns of your residents, and prospective renters love that.
Word Your Responses Carefully
Now that you know to respond to reviews, it’s important that you know how to respond to reviews. Make no mistake that this is one of the hardest things about apartment reputation management. It’s difficult to keep your cool when responding to a negative review that falsely accuses your community of something, or is peppered with personal insults about you or your staff. However, it’s critical you don’t let emotions get the better of you. A single poorly worded response published on impulse can hurt you more than a single bad online review ever could. So what constitutes a well worded response? Well, although there’s no one-size-fits-all formula, we recommend that all of your responses A) are polite, B) address the compliment or concern brought up in the review, C) identify how you’re working to fix any concerns, and/or D) provide clarity about any events that may have been misrepresented by the reviewer. Note that those last two points only really apply to negative reviews.
Need Help Handling Reviews?
Although we’re confident the tips outlined above will help you improve your apartment reputation management strategy, we know not everyone has the time or resources to implement them across their entire property portfolio. That’s why Respage offers several online reputation management services for multifamily to help you track and respond to reviews. Improve your reputation and save yourself precious time by learning more about them today!
