In 2011, I took a year off of Facebook. It was great. Sure, I missed some cute baby pictures, but really, it was sweet relief to slow the stream of content. Now, part of my job is managing multiple social media accounts and leveraging these platforms for my clients and my company, Resident360.
Honestly, social media both annoys and awes me. It really is amazing to be able to spread information, communicate ideas and connect with people instantly. But, at the same time… wow. There’s a lot of information and scrolling through it all can make me crazy.
So, what’s the point? Everything you post on your apartment community Facebook page must have value. Don’t post something just to post something. [click to continue…]
There’s a lot of chatter around current multifamily blogs and magazines questioning the value of investing time in a Facebook presence for apartment communities. My personal opinion is that it does have real value (beyond simply the obvious corresponding SEO boost) as long as you can streamline the time commitment and have a real strategy so you’re not just floundering about letting time slip away in the black hole that social media can be.
However, even more important than having a slick social media strategy is having a consistent plan to enable your residents to connect in person with their neighbors and on-site staff. You can’t make people be friends. But you can create environments that allow them the opportunity to build connections with other people in their apartment community.
[click to continue…]
There are many strategies for posting apartments on craigslist and I think your best tactic is to always be using more than one angle. It’s not rocket science to grasp that different demographics will be drawn to different content in a title. And although we all want to rent to employed, responsible humans – that still results in a wide range of demographics.
In order to engage with as wide a range as possible, try posting for the same vacant unit with three entirely different titles. (Although I’m focusing on the title, remember that in order to avoid ‘ghosting,’ the content of the post cannot be exactly the same in all three.)
One way to approach this is to give each title a specific focus. Contine Reading →
Negative reviews on ApartmentRatings.Com, Yelp and Google Reviews can ruin more than just your ego. The last thing you want a prospective resident to see is the first line of a negative Google review when they click on your location on a Google Map. Especially when it’s something really awesome like: “DoN’t ReNt hErE!!!! It sUX.”
Although you can’t do much about former residents who think they should receive their entire deposit back, even though their cat peed on every available surface in the apartment, you can make a difference for reasonable residents by simply giving them more information so they have healthy expectations about the resident experience and the move-out experience. [click to continue…]
