With apartment marketing, it’s not enough to simply have a social media presence. Multifamily social media marketing has become an important part of any apartment community’s digital marketing strategy. The first step in making the most of it is understanding what’s driving prospect and resident engagement.
Likes, clicks, comments and shares are all forms of engagement. If you’re being strategic with your apartment community content and sharing high-quality posts at the right time, your apartment social media followers are more likely to stay engaged. This means your content will show up more prominently on their newsfeeds. As a result, your posts could then appear in their friends’ newsfeeds, which can create more visibility and credibility for your apartment community.
As apartment communities place more of an emphasis on social media, it’s beneficial to know what’s working and what’s not. Summarizing your data into a social media report can help you map out how to proceed into the future with your apartment marketing efforts. Here’s how to do it.
Determine your timeframe
All social networks allow you to pull data from their native analytics report, so this is where you want to start.
First, decide whether you want to take a look at weekly, monthly or quarterly data. Keep in mind that quarterly reporting lets you see longer-term trends and dig deeper into your data, whereas shorter-term reports can be thrown off by anomalies.
Who will be reading your report?
Different stakeholders will be interested in different data, so figure out who your audience is and tailor accordingly. For example, senior managers might be most interested in financial figures and conversions, while the marketing team might be most focused on campaign-specific performance data.
Decide which metrics to track
Rather than weighing your report down with extraneous data or placing a lot of emphasis on a single metric, tracking multiple key performance indicators allows you to concentrate on which metrics you can learn from and which ones will help guide your decision-making going forward.
Keep an eye on these key data points:
- Reach. The total number of people who see your content.
- Impressions. The number of times your content was displayed regardless of whether it received any clicks.
- New followers. Ideally, this is a number that should be increasing.
- Engagement. Clicks, comments, shares and likes are valuable indicators that you’re posting content that people are interested in seeing.
- Traffic. You want people to reach your website via social, so the more traffic you send, the better.
- Clicks. Similar to engagement, click-throughs signal great content.
- Conversions. If your goal is assessing your financial return on investment, keep an eye on this key metric. In multifamily, a successful conversion could be when someone fills out a rental application or schedules a tour.
Be clear on your goals
Without context, all of the data you’re collecting doesn’t have much meaning. Goals provide a framework for your efforts, guide your budget and hold you accountable. Is your intention to engage local followers and increase your presence in your city? Build awareness of your apartment community and generate leads for it? Figure out what you want out of your social media reports and work toward that.
Establish your SMART goals
There’s a reason why social marketers abide by this acronym when it comes to goal-setting: It’s all about action that’s backed up by data:
- Specific. The more precise your goal, the easier it will be to clearly see what you’re trying to achieve. Make it simple, clear and defined.
- Measurable. This is how you measure your success. Put concrete numbers in your goals, like achieving a certain percentage increase in clicks or conversions.
- Attainable. Make sure that you can realistically achieve your goals. Base your goals on your data rather than industry benchmarks that might be out of reach at the moment.
- Relevant. Ask yourself if your goals support your apartment community’s overall business objectives, vision and values.
- Time-specific. Establish a deadline for your goals to keep you on schedule.
Identify your goal metrics
In order to achieve your goals, you have to assign key metrics to each one. As an example, say your goal is to build awareness of your apartment community on Facebook. You will want to focus on these metrics:
- Number of followers
- Number of impressions on your posts and your page
- Clicks to your community website
- How much reach your posts receive
Using the SMART framework, the goal of increasing brand awareness for your community within the next quarter might look like this:
- Specific: Grow brand awareness through Facebook within a 10-mile radius of the community by increasing our posting frequency from four to seven times per week.
- Measurable: Increase follower count by 15%, increase link clicks on posts by 10%, have an average post reach of 500 people per post.
- Achievable: Yes — over the last three months, our follower count increased by 10% when we increased our weekly publishing frequency from two to four times per week.
- Relevant: By increasing brand awareness, we’ll generate more leads and conversions.
- Time-specific: We will achieve this goal within three months.
- SMART goal: After three months, our follower count will increase by 15% by stepping up our posting from four to seven times per week.
Tools that can help
Respage’s new Weekly Social Digest is an owner and regional level report covering your entire portfolio’s social media metrics for the prior week, including comparisons to the previous week. Setup is customized to the executive’s needs (i.e. region view). It breaks the data down by top post, top property and top user (this goes by the email address of the user whose posts were the most successful and how often they posted). It also offers breakdowns of social posts per week by property and social network.
We’ve also enhanced our Facebook Insights Report, which provides analytics on the most important performance indicators for campaign performance, including the number of new followers, total reach and engagement.
Contact us to learn more about how Respage can help you achieve your apartment marketing social media goals.
