Over the past decade or so, social media has become a major player when it comes to apartment marketing. It’s easy to see why: It’s cost effective, it’s audience-driven, it’s fun, and most people have some social media presence, so you’re meeting your prospects and current tenants where they are.
Apartment social media can be a powerful way to reach your target audience and keep vacancies low in your community, but you need a solid apartment social media content strategy in order to reap the benefits. Winging it most likely won’t get you the results you want, so it’s worthwhile to think through these ideas and come up with a plan that will work for you.
In this post, we’ll explain what you need to consider when creating a great apartment content plan to help your community flourish on social media.
Set your apartment social media content goals
The first step is to identify your overall apartment marketing goals and how your social media content will help you reach them. Common goals for social include:
- Increasing apartment brand awareness
- Generating apartment sales leads
- Growing engagement
- Increasing traffic to your apartment website
For example, let’s say your goal is to convert more leases from social media. Your apartment content strategy should include posts that direct users to a landing page where they can fill out an application online.
Understand your audience
In apartment marketing, your main audiences are your current and prospective renters. Based on what you know of your current residents and what you hope to find in prospects, create an ideal resident persona.
What’s their age range? What are their interests? What kind of job do they have? What’s important to them? Knowing the answers to these questions can help you tailor your apartment content so it resonates with your apartment target audience. For instance, an apartment community in a big city known for its environmentally friendly practices and an apartment community in a family-oriented suburb would have quite different personas.
Audit the performance of your existing social media content
Taking a look at how your past apartment social media content has performed can give you valuable insights as to what types of content you should share going forward. Figure out which posts performed well, which ones didn’t, and what elements the top content performers have in common.
Your audit should align with your social media content goals. So, if one of your goals is to increase apartment brand awareness, take a look at your follower count and identify which posts resulted in new followers. This can help you determine what types of content can capture the attention of new followers.
Create a social media content calendar
After you’ve identified your goals, figured out your resident personas and audited your existing content, the next step is to build a social media content calendar. Planning out your content in advance and scheduling your posts will save time and build consistency. It also lets you try out different types of apartment social media content to see what your followers respond to.
When it comes to figuring out what kind of social media content to post, here’s a good guideline:
Promotional: Highlight what makes your community such a great place to call home.
Entertaining: Give your followers a fun, behind-the-scenes look at your community.
Curated: Share interesting articles that your residents would enjoy, such as things to do in your city.
This content will be the backbone of your apartment social media strategy, mixed in with spur-of-the-moment posts reacting to the events of the day (as appropriate, of course.)
Measure the results
Ideally, you should analyze your social media content on a monthly basis and track which types of content worked and which ones didn’t. The most important metrics to measure include:
Engagement: The number of comments, clicks, reactions and shares your content received
Awareness: The number of times people saw your content
Conversions: The number of times users took an action, like scheduling a tour or filling out a rental application
Just as you did with your content audit, see which analytics support your overall apartment social media content goals. If you measure your results every month, it will give you more clarity on what changes you need to make to reach your goals.
Conclusion
Planning your apartment community’s social media content strategy should be an ongoing process. If you devote a few hours every month to mapping out your content and measuring the results, you should succeed at meeting your overall content goals.
If you need help, contact Respage! We are experts at apartment social media, and we have a dedicated team who focuses specifically on social media content.
