In order to succeed in today’s highly competitive digital domain, your property must have a strong presence on social media. To truly take advantage of all that social media has to offer, a more holistic approach—one that balances both awareness and conversion goals and accounts for the entirety of the customer journey—is required.
Let’s face it. These days people have the attention span of a goldfish. They want bite-sized information and the goal is to stop the scroll. It’s crucial that you’re producing relevant, consistent, and engaging social media content for your property. This gives your audience and future residents an insight into your community while fostering a welcoming space for current residents as well as the potential to build local partnerships.
80% of apartment seekers refer to social media before choosing their next rental property.
Multi-housing New, 2021
The Value of a Social Media Strategy
Branding is more than just pretty aesthetics and logo overlays. From the tone, voice, color palette, logo, right down to the typography, your apartment brand is a story, a feeling, a perception. Whether your property is a lease-up, stabilized, or undergoing a rebranding (that’s a whole other beast), it’s creating greater awareness about your unique community, so you can stand out from your competition. It’s about connection and differentiation. When you catch the attention of a future resident through marketing efforts, it needs to be strong enough to entice them to learn more about your property, including the environment you foster for residents, the amenities you offer, and the neighborhood they could call their own. Essentially, for your property to be top of mind when someone is considering relocating.
Metrics to Measure
First things first. You’ll want to ensure your property’s Facebook and Instagram are connected and you will need a business Instagram in order to accurately measure data insights beyond 30 days.
Engagement Rate | Industry average 2%. This includes your likes, shares, saves, and comments divided by total post reach. You’ll want to see what content is performing well.
Reach: Total number of people that see your posts
Follower Growth: Finding the average audience growth rate percentage (net new followers/total followers x 100)
Days & Times Your Audience is Active: Posting at optimal dates and times (a consistent schedule will help the algorithms serve your content to more of your followers) is crucial in the ever-evolving world of social media. The optimal days and times when your audience is active can be pulled from your social media management platform or dashboard. If you don’t have historical data, here’s a place to start:
Best times to post on Facebook
- Best times: Friday 7 a.m., Tuesday 6–9 a.m.
- Best days: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday
- Worst day: Saturday
Best times to post on Instagram
- Best times: Tuesday 1–5 p.m., Wednesday 11 a.m., Thursday 8–9 a.m.
- Best day: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday
- Worst day: Sunday
- What makes sense for one platform might not make sense for another. Multifamily is a visually driven industry, so focusing social media efforts on channels like Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn can increase your chances for success and engagement.
Posting Cadence
You don’t need to reel and deal content all day every day. Posting 3-4 times a week is sufficient to be in favor of the fierce social media algorithms. Additionally, posting every day isn’t super scalable. If account posts every day for a while and then switch to a less frequent cadence for whatever reason, that could harm the overall engagement rate. Don’t forget about stories and videos! It also helps your strategy to share others’ content (user-generated content), whether an article on LinkedIn or a story on Instagram.
Keep Social Media Social
Your audience, whether that be current or future residents, reach out via messages and comments for quick responses. You don’t want to leave them hanging, so we recommend responding between 24-72 hours, same goes with your reviews. This shows you take feedback, inquiries, and comments seriously and that no lead goes unled.
How Organic Social Impacts SEO
Consistent posting on social media has been found to increase SERP rankings, broaden post reach, boost conversion rates, and build credibility within your residents. Another factor to keep in mind is that social media profiles rank in search engines, so ensuring that your bio includes keywords about who you are, and what your profile is about, will also help improve your discovery potential. Having a strong social media presence can also enhance trust in a brand and trust is one of the three entities that Google and other search engines try to assess when ranking a page organically (EAT = Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)
- 53% of website traffic comes from organic search
- Posting on Social Gets Content Indexed Quicker
- Social Drives Traffic While You Wait for SEO
Organic Social is the Fun, Hippy Cousin of Paid
Having a consistent organic social presence, you can (and should!) add on some social media ads as 70% of renters feel social media advertising is effective in creating interest in a community (Localiq, 2021). Having a holistic marketing strategy to maximize your branding impact with both organic and paid social is vital, as those researching your brand will likely go on to explore your social media pages.
Final Thoughts
There’s more to social media than dance trends and doomscrolling. It’s about brand awareness and fostering a community for current and future residents by producing authentic, relevant, and engaging content for your apartment community. That a strong social media presence is more about storytelling than sales pitches, it’s about creating connections and fostering a community. That social media is no longer an afterthought or a bonus in a well-designed apartment marketing strategy; it should be a fully integrated component
Want to delve into your Organic Social strategy? We’d love to chat.
