If you’re an apartment marketer and you have yet to bring TikTok into your apartment’s social media marketing mix, you could be overlooking a huge growth opportunity.
This is because the demographics of TikTok users and apartment residents overlap, meaning that TikTok could be a powerful way for apartment marketers to reach prospects where they are.
Consider this: Forty-eight percent of U.S. adults between 18 and 29 years old use TikTok, and that demographic aligns with that of apartment renters. People under 35 represent the largest demographic of apartment residents.
Not only that, TikTok is the fastest-growing social media app in the world, with 80 million active users in the U.S. alone. It’s possible to reach a large number of people at a relatively low cost, allowing you to surpass your competition, especially if they haven’t taken the time to learn how the app works.
TikTok allows users to create and share short videos that can be 15 seconds, 60 seconds, or three minutes in length on any topic. In this post, we’ll discuss how to use TikTok in your apartment marketing strategy.
Explore the Tools and Trends
TikTok offers a multitude of tools that apartment marketers can use to spark interest in their community in a creative way. With the Green Screen effect, for example, you could use a video of an apartment tour as your background while you speak to the camera. Or you could try pairing a fast-paced apartment tour with trending music.
Trends are big in the TikTok world, and many new TikTok users get their feet wet by re-creating videos that have been turned into trends. This is a lighter lift than executing your original idea, plus TikTok rewards videos that use certain trending music, sounds, or hashtags by showing them to a greater number of users, so it’s also a great way to potentially get more views.
The trick for apartment marketers is coming up with an angle for the trend that would work for multifamily. Get creative and ask other members of your team for their ideas, too.
Trends come and go quickly on TikTok, so before filming your video, double-check to make sure it’s still, well, trending. The best way to do this is to go to the sound page and look at the most recent videos that use it. If most of the videos are a few days or weeks old, it’s safe to assume that the trend is no longer considered hot.
Create Your Content in Bulk
Many savvy TikTok creators set aside a day or two each week to make multiple videos for later posting. As we mentioned, trends are somewhat easier to execute and they could give your account some traction. As you get more comfortable with using TikTok for apartment marketing, you’ll undoubtedly start coming up with your original ideas.
These are a few TikTok apartment video ideas that you should be able to pull off without too much difficulty:
- Video tour of specific units in your community
- Answer the top 10 FAQs about your community
- Video tour of the amenities
- Anything pet-related
Try A Resident Takeover
During a resident takeover, you turn over your TikTok account to a trusted resident of your community and allow them to create and post videos for a defined period of time, like a day or a week. This can be a fun way to bring more personality to your account. And, if the resident doing the takeover has a substantial following of their own, you’re likely to get more views and, hopefully, followers.
You can find a resident to do this by posting on your social accounts or sending an email explaining your goal and offering something in return, like a gift card.
If you’re aware of a resident of your apartment community who has a large TikTok following, you can make the deal a bit sweeter (if you have the budget for it) by offering something more substantial, like a percentage off of the following month’s rent.
Partner with an Influencer
If your budget allows, you could explore partnering with a TikTok influencer to promote your apartment community. The difference between working with an influencer and having a resident do a takeover is creative control. Working with an influencer is like working with a contractor—you will tell them what you are looking for, and you can approve the content before it gets posted.
You don’t need to have a TikTok influencer as a resident to do this. Take some time to do some sleuthing on the app to find influencers who are local, then offer to host them for a few days. Beforehand, you can go over your vision for the partnership and what kinds of videos you’d like them to create, how many, and compensation.
TikTok can help generate leads
TikTok can be a fun and effective way to market your apartment community and meet your prospective residents where they are. But don’t lose sight of the goal: generating leads. It’s important to make it easy for prospects to contact you, so add a link to your community website in your profile.
Also, TikTok’s analytics are a goldmine of insights into your audience’s engagement with your content. As you experiment with different types of content, monitor what your audience responds to so you can get a clearer idea as to what works best for your community.
Click the button below to learn about the Respage Social Management dashboard, and how it can help your community reach more renters on TikTok.
