Social Media for Property Management

Social media represents a great, unexplored opportunity for Realtors, property managers, and yes Landlords.  But how many property pros do social marketing well enough to make it produce bottom line results?

Companies are investing in their Facebook and Twitter presence. However, most are doing paid clicks to get their results.  It’s expensive buying eyeballs, and it seems to lack an engaging experience.  You could use a less expensive, more engaging, free, organic online marketing strategy to connect with your customers.

15 Tips to Help Use Social Media Well

We’ve got 15 excellent social media marketing tips on how to ramp up your organic social media reach and make it generate bottom line results — visibility, clicks, engagement and revenue.  Whether it’s new clients or tenants, the point is that social media is big, yet not business friendly.

You may have seen yourself how challenging it is to create leads or engage clients and tenants online. Social is important and you need to use this channel well. It’s not going away.

A Natural Channel for Real Customers

Marshall MacLuhan the advertising guru, once said The Medium is the Message. If that’s true, then paying for visibility and leads raises some questions. Reaching leads via free organic channels makes more sense if you want to make a sincere, engaging and lasting connection and to resonate with their actual daily lives.

Social marketing is an art, since you’re trying to connect business with real people who are sharing selfies and dog and food pics.

The challenge is to grow connections naturally and gently engage them with timely, high quality content. If you can save your marketing budget, all the better.  This is turn feeds your Google organic search presence. Give it some time to be creative and effective.

Winter is a Great Time to Begin Your Social Strategy

Winter has less distractions, and perhaps more time to invest in social strategy.

Don’t Burn Out Your Marketing Budget

Facebook, Linkedin, Snapchat, Twitter or other social networks limit (unpaid) organic reach to people. It’s true, these companies are tightening the screws further to make users pay more. That’s why companies are paying just to speak to their audiences. It’s a tax on conversation.

Google is the same way. They’re squeezing the search results with more ads and clutter to make it harder for you to generate free traffic from them. You need to be better in every way to get seen.

Build Reach and Deliver Good Stuff

If you reached this post via Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin, or Google and Bing, you’re aware of how it has reached you. Good relevant topics, meaningful events and news do reach renters, buyers, sellers, investors, landlords and influencers.

Yet some users will not like posts on business topics even if they are helpful.  You’ll have churn, and that’s okay because those who drop you probably would never become your customer or brand ambassador anyway.  So if you’re all stopped up by some envisioned barriers, don’t.  You’ll reach your audience. Keep the faith.

Impressions, Clicks, Likes and Shares

In this graphic below, we see one of our social media posts which caught on virally and achieved 1000 clicks via Twitter alone on one day. Don’t be overly impressed with likes in posts. Facebook doesn’t regard them highly anymore and Google pays no attention to them for search rankings. Social shares however are important.

Social pages and posts generate awareness, connectedness, and help generate engagement with you.

Yes, a lot of what you see on FB for instance is fluff and silliness. It takes some content strategy skill to navigate in these noisy conditions and generate business value (while not hurting your brand image).

In this post Mike Chou talks of his challenges in listing and selling. When prospects start checking him out, they see some posts that highlight his skills and results and generosity.

Screenshot courtesy of Facebook

And he runs a contest to get prospects and customers continuously engaged.

Screen capture courtesy of Facebook

Mike is just one Realtor using using Facebook creatively. You’ll find others who are active in Facebook and Instagram.  Because of FB’s suppression of exploration, you may have better results doing your connection research using Google.

What is the Number 1 Mistake Companies Make?

If all you have is a company Facebook or Twitter page, it won’t work. For a number of reasons, it can’t engage people. Engagement comes via personal accounts and events where you can interact naturally with connections as a person. Few people want to interact with a company (initially). In fact, many people won’t connect to a company account.

Setting up personal accounts for you and your staff is wise. Then you can focus on your engagement strategy and invest your time wisely.  You’ll have more reach with several FB accounts.

How Can We Make Property Rental and Sales Engaging?

Approach social media as company with a human face.  It’s difficult to succeed in social media as a company brand.  Engagement and connectivity is all about conversations between people.  The paid, slick strategy big corporations employ is unlikely to work for you.

Real estate agents and property managers who fail to get personally active in their circles have no news/events to share, and thus no conversation and stories to tell, and nothing to celebrate. They’re not actively weaving a real human connection, and not building awareness of their activities and how relevant they are.

You have to do it, and then make it all visible so others can share in it. By the way, if you’ve had some good results from a post, you can do a paid boost of that post when appropriate. Publish and test. Find out what works first.

Here’s another example of making an impact — an amazing testimonial contained in a beautiful photograph. Definitely makes an impact.

Screenshot courtesy of Facebook.com

Free Up Time and Get Personal

If you have no time for social activity, time and interaction, it will be difficult to create credibility with your audience. What audiences want is transparency, familiarity, and experiences, and to hear what you have to say personally, so they can trust you.

If you choose to use a time saving, property management software platform, then you’ll free up time to engage socially. Find any way you can to get that time.

It’s About Trust, Respect, and Perhaps Admiration

When professionals get active online, they forget what’s being transacted — you’re giving value for their attention and trust. The value for them is good feelings, emotions, information, participation, acknowledgement, feeling of belonging, and helping them make decisions.

After you create a range of experiences with you within them, they start to feel they know and understand you. They may even start to like you, read your content, share it, and chat with you.  Definitely celebrate via Facebook, but make it meaningful. Share something with them. Otherwise your celebration comes off as narcissistic and creates resentment.

Engagement is an art for sure, so your own social skills, creativity, imagination, and sensitivity are important assets.

Before you start, get reacquainted with your own unique value proposition, your desired target customer, and your own performance highlights. Have a defined end goal to move them to their moment of decision.

The purpose of organic social activity is to generate an emotional connection with prospects and get them to decide to hire you.  This was a live property management event held recently.

Screenshot courtesy of Facebook Live.

15 of the Most Effective Ways to Boost Organic Reach

1. create great content assets — because this will generate its own reach such as photos, illustrations, videos, tips, tricks, how to’s, market info, technology, cultural trends, important events.
2. understand social algorithms — test and discover which keywords, topics, pictures, and hashtags work best
3. publish more frequently —(once an hour max to avoid platform blocking and spam responses) but ensure the post has value to your audience
4. discover which topics create the best blog post engagement and visitors — then dig into those topics deeper
5. run a contest — contests work if they offer something the audience truly wants and can’t find elsewhere
6. go live — a live podcast or live Facebook event can increase credibility and trust
7. feature an industry expert/influencer’s own content — and interview them for feedback and their latest thoughts
8. create platform specific content — as Twitter polls, Facebook polls, facebook stories, Instagram stories, or a Linkedin industry report post, etc. to maximize their features.
9. use popular content — such as industry trends, videos, and other posts, and the value will rub off on you
10. create your own video — plan and organize it so it has impact and value
11. avoid anything that makes you look ineffective, foolish, narcissistic, or angry — or you’ll reduce your organic exposure when people unfriend you or block your posts
12. promote your celebrations — reflecting your appreciation, proof of your success and good way of doing business
13. use attention grabbing headlines — and a description that gets the key point or value prop across
14. encourage others to take the time to share — you need to grow your reach
15. use software tools to discover the best times for shares — track users from social channels to learn what they do on your website (buffer, hootsuite, mention, etc.)

Social Media Marketing: Skill and Hard Work

What’s the final takeaway from organic social media sales performance? Don’t get lazy and buy ads. Ensure you maximize your content strategy to get the best overall value possible as you connect socially.  The people you’re targeting do want to engage with you. Encourage them. Give them a reason.

You might be thinking “oh my god, this is hard work and I don’t have time for it.”  Well, you may be right, you should respect the effort and skills needed.

Be genuinely active with others, and engage on their terms.  If it’s too much for you, you’ll need to find a good social media marketer, one with whom you can entrust your brand and reputation. Perhaps one of your staff members can be trained for it?

Even if you aren’t the ultimate social media strategist, you can still win by being truly active in the time you have, as many do, and also be helpful and responsive.

By the way, there are sophisticated techniques for expanding organic reach, and getting past Facebook, Twitter and Linkedins’ filters.  I hope to let you know about them soon.

Check out ManageCasa’s customer marketing websites — included in your subscription and discover more property management marketing tips.

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