16 Tips to Help Use Social Media Well
Social media channels can be a powerful tool for establishing brand value, driving leads and creating great tenant relations.
It’s not as easy as some would suggest and even talented social media marketers have quite a task on their hands. They need tools, assets, resources and solid understanding of how to make a brand relevant and liked.
Enjoy these 16 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, brand value, and ongoing rent revenue. Whether it’s new clients or tenants, the point is that social media is a massive marketplace, yet not exactly business-friendly.
The solution to the challenge is a focus on connecting, nurturing friends and delivering real value. You probably know how challenging it is to create leads or engage clients and tenants online. Many are going all paid to get reach, but look at paid posts/ads as a way to supercharge your organic postings and engagement.
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 reducing search results, pushing more ads and clutter to make it harder for you to generate free traffic from that channel. 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.
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.
Yes, a lot of what you see on FB for instance is fluff, promotion and silliness. It takes some content strategy skills to navigate in these noisy conditions and generate business value (while not hurting your brand image).
Sometimes it’s easy, if your company is active in the community and making a difference in people’s lives. It’s genuine and people respect it. However, even good deeds need to be presented well.
In this post, Realtor Mike Chou talks of his challenges in listing and selling. When prospects start checking him out, they see some posts that highlight his skills, personality, 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 Facebook creatively. Because of FB’s suppression of exposure, you may have better results doing your connection research using Google.
What is the Number 1 Mistake Companies Make?
If all you have is Company Facebook, Linkedin or Twitter pages, it won’t work. For a number of reasons, a company page engages poorly. Engagement comes via personal accounts and events where you can interact naturally with connections as a person with their daily activities. 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. Don’t forget that the visual medium of Instagram offers connections to young renters.
How Can We Make Property Rental and Sales Engaging?
Approach social media as a company with a human face. Engagement and connectivity is all about conversations between people. The paid, slick strategy big corporations employ is unlikely to work for you — that is all about conversion, not trust or brand building.
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.
Social media requires solid blocks of time to relax, read, respond, share, and intentionally create a pleasant relationship with connections.
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, acknowledgment, 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 of brand awareness and engagement levels.
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.
16 of the Most Effective Ways to Boost Organic Reach
Getting reach on Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter is very difficult now. Their AI systems have immense stopping power and there’s no doubt they’ll reduce your exposure. The solution is great content ideas, investing time, posting, engaging, and doing some paid boosts.
- 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.
- understand social algorithms — test and discover which keywords, topics, pictures, and hashtags work best
- publish more frequently —(once an hour max to avoid platform blocking and spam responses) but ensure the post has value to your audience
- discover which topics create the best blog post engagement and visitors — then dig into those topics deeper
- run a contest — contests work if they offer something the audience truly wants and can’t find elsewhere
- go live — a live podcast or live Facebook event can increase credibility and trust
- feature an industry expert/influencer’s own content — and interview them for feedback and their latest thoughts
- create platform-specific content — as Twitter polls, Facebook polls, Facebook stories, Instagram stories, or a Linkedin industry report post, etc. to maximize their features.
- use popular content — such as industry trends, videos, and other posts, and the value will rub off on you
- create your own video — plan and organize it so it has impact and value
- 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
- show some of your best rental units — ask for feedback on improvements, amenities, and encourage their opinions, thus letting them communicate their real perspectives.
- promote your celebrations — reflecting your appreciation, proof of your success and good way of doing business
- use attention-grabbing headlines — and a description that gets the key point or value prop across
- encourage others to take the time to share — you need to grow your reach and encourage their engagement
- 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.
Check out ManageCasa’s customer marketing websites — and discover more property management marketing tips.
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