Twitter

With social media constantly changing, it can seem like the options are endless, so where do you start? Look no further!  Here are 25 things you should be doing with social media right now:

1. Set up an account and start taking pictures with Instagram.  It is an easy photo taking and sharing app that was recently purchased by Facebook, so there are big things to come!
2. Create a Pinterest board of apartment-friendly decorating ideas for your residents.
3. Partner with a popular neighborhood restaurant to provide your residents with a Facebook exclusive offer.  Post a status update with coupon code to redeem 20% off.  It will make your fans feel really special.
4. Tweet street cleaning schedules to make sure your residents don’t get tickets.
5. Take a poll on your Facebook page asking residents what brand of coffee they would like in the lobby this month, then let them know you listened!
6. Choose a resident to highlight as your Resident of the Month on Facebook in an effort to help everyone get to know their neighbors.
7. Create a Facebook group for your employees to swap ideas, ask questions, give praise for a job well done and get to know each other.  Make sure the group is set as private.
8. Start Trivia Tuesdays on Twitter and give away small prizes to your residents for correct answers.
9. Ask your residents to Like you and follow you on social media websites!  You would be surprised how simply asking will help grow your fan base.
10. Keep your LinkedIn company profile up to date with current job openings and company information.  You can recruit top talent this way.
11. Read multifamily industry blogs, like Multifamily Insiders and Apartments.com/blog, to stay on top of trends and news.
12. Start a blog that provides relevant apartment living, neighborhood and community information for your residents.
13. Respond to all comments and mentions on social media, whether positive or negative, in a timely, professional manner.
14. Create Facebook events for your community get-togethers so residents have all the information on the website they check most often, as well as the ability to see who else is attending.
15. Tweet the weather forecast first thing every morning to help your residents decide what to wear.
16. Host a charity like-a-thon and donate a certain amount of money or volunteer hours for every new Like you get on Facebook during a period of time.
17. Add your social media profiles to all of your current marketing materials, so people know you are active on those websites.
18. Start accepting maintenance request via your Facebook wall.  Make sure to respond to each request and follow up after the job is complete.  This will show current and prospective residents how great your customer service is.
19. Create a Facebook application with your leasing office and community staff photos and bios, so your residents know who to go to with questions, as well as the names of the people that make their community run smoothly.
20. Tweet fun, easy recipes that residents can make during the work week.
21. Wish residents happy birthday on Facebook or Twitter.
22. When the first of the month is rolling around and rent is due, tweet out a reminder for residents.
23. Create a social media policy and training course for your employees to ensure they understand the importance and responsibility of online behavior.
24. Capture nice things your residents are saying about you online and repurpose them in marketing materials or in a slide show that plays on your lobby TV’s.
25. Monitor mentions of your property management company name, community name and neighborhood on social networking websites and respond accordingly. 

Unfortunately, it’s sort-of a part of my job description to monitor Twitter activity surrounding industry conferences in far away, sunny places and look with envy upon attendees’ waterfront-hotel-“look at my awesome view!” instagram portraits. But last month, as I watched the pictures, tweets, and facebook updates roll in from the Texas Apartment Association Education Conference, I became increasingly convinced: these guys got game. I’ve seen industry conferences of national audiences that struggle to get this sort of online buzz. And here this conference in San Antonio was the talk of the town — because you see, if hashtags were municipalities, #TAA2012 was booming like Skagway during the Klondike great gold rush.

Well, curiosity got the better of me. Using online stalking skills innate to all people under 30 — with maybe the exception of those associated with amish communities — I got in contact with Joel Nihlean, TAA’s Marketing & Communications Manager, who generously agreed to an interview. As I anticipated, Joel’s a social media rock star. With a strong background in event management, web writing, public relations, and graphic design, he has successfully planned, managed, and implemented the association’s marketing programs and e-communications since he started working with them in 2010. Also, he’s an unabashed, self-professed nerd; so we were fast friends and he taught me the secrets to becoming a pinball wizard (step 1: kicka%^  Alf tattoo)

Last week Blackberry/RIM and Best Buy were two businesses that went on a list of dying companies.  It's often hard to predict what the future holds, and we have a tendency to get tunnel vision when it comes to our own businesses.  It's unfortunate these companies have found themselves to be in dire straights, but for me I look at situations like this as an opportunity to reflect on my own business and industry. What may look like a solid model today, may not be tomorrow.  With that, I'd like to share my list of five multifamily marketing/tech models that may be in trouble.

1. The ILS - I've actually been known to say that the ILS is an absurd marketing idea.  While I may have been trying to generate some controversy with that statement nearly 3 years ago, it's interesting to think today I actually believe the ILS model is in trouble a bit.  At least the way the big players look today.  If you look at Apartments.com, ApartmentGuide.com, ForRent.com, Rent.com, Move.com, etc., you'll find their models really haven't changed much since they started.  However, the way people search online is changing.  We may see a few fall off over the next 5 years if they don't evolve in an aggressive way.

2. Pay Per Lease Marketing Model - As tracking becomes more sophisticated we're finding (and concluding) renters are using more than one source to find an apartment.  Is it fair to give all the credit to a single source and pay them a premium for it?  I say NO FRIGGIN WAY!  Marketers are getting smarter and this model is a gimmick that has taken advantage of people for too long.  I think this fad will most definitely pass in the near future as pay per lead or flat subscription pricing will win.

If you can properly identify flippers, glitz, and pageant crack, then like me, then you’ve probably tuned in to watch TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras a time or two (or twelve...). The hit TLC show explores the world of child beauty pageants — little girls (and boys) poked and prodded by ill-judging parents to parade around on stage with makeup, spray tans, and outrageous costumes, in a quest for 3ft-tall crowns and fans of 100 dollar bills. I might as well fess up: I’m one of those self-righteous hypocrites who’s shocked and appalled, but just. can’t. stop. watching. It’s an absolute train wreck and I can’t look away!

I hope and pray that we never encourage the children under our care to emulate those on TLC, but while we’re on the subject, our Twitter accounts shouldn’t look like Toddlers & Tiaras either. And I’m not talking photoshopped profile pics; if that’s how you roll, I’m not gonna judge. But if you’re managing a Twitter account associated with a property or business, it’s particularly important to keep your voice in check.

I can’t stand Lady Gaga’s music. I just wanted to establish that right from the get-go. If I were forced to listen to more than 30 seconds of Poker Face, I imagine I would become borderline suicidal. Regardless of how I feel about her music, I can’t balk at Lady Gaga’s unprecedented social media presence.

In less than two years, the 25-year-old, five-time Grammy Award-winning artist created a monstrous social media machine to which there is no equal. Her online presence has grown to the extent that she even launched her own social networking site, LittleMonsters.com, earlier this month. Currently the most-followed Twitter account on the planet, @ladygaga boasts over 19 million followers. She has over 48 million Facebook fans, making her fan page one of the most popular in the world. To top it all off, her total number of YouTube views stands at over two billion.

Dark Virtual Storm Still on the Horizon?

It was a dark day on Wednesday, January 18, 2012—for some of us more than others.  Murphy’s Law was in full effect the moment my feet hit the ground that morning, and the string of mishaps continued when I got to work and turned on my computer. I opened Google to check my email, and I saw a thick, black bar covering the logo at the top of the page.

And I'm not talking the married kind of engagement. (although that can be pretty pricey too)

I'm talking the price of engagement in regards to social media. I was not a bandwagon social media user. I wanted to understand how to engage and converse with our residents and potential residents before I jumped on the social media train. I also wanted to understand how to measure engagement and then translate that to value for our clients. 

For me, the  issue with social media is not the time it takes to post, blog or tweet, the issue is engagement. Are you maximizing on opportunities of engagement? Are you talking at your residents and prospects are talking with them? Having thousands of fans or followers are great but what are you doing with them?

What gives you the best engagement bang for you buck? I have included my top three.

DON'T BE A NEWS FEED HOG

Posting and tweeting are a marathon, not a race. If you clog up their news feed, they are sure to unfollow or unsubscribe. Studies show a post every 3-4 hours is the sweet spot.

INSIGHTS

Are you looking at your insights page? Your insights page has a wealth of information and demographics. Use that to your advantage when posting. 

FEEDBACK SCORE

Look at your most successful post (in terms of likes, comments, impressions, re-tweets, etc) and figure out your feedback score. For the posts with the highest feedback percentage, do you see a pattern of posts people engage with most... sports, fashion, decorating ideas? 

I benchmark everything. As a Director of Marketing, making sure my marketing team's time is well spent requires just that, benchmarking everything. Have we figured out the secret formula to social media, engagement and ROI.. not yet but I'm working on it. :-)

Happy posting!

Sparkle Hammond, M.Ed.  First Communities | Director of Marketing
shammond@firstcommunities.net
www.century-apartments.com | www.facebook.com/centuryapartmenthomes

It seems like over the past five years or so, an infinite number of marketing channels have emerged. We bought pages on listing sites, then we created our own property websites.  Now web pages are generated for our property just by having a resident “check in” on Facbook or Foursquare.  Seriously!

 This makes it extremely challenging for an apartment community to have one coherent brand on the web. So what’s a marketer to do?

If you haven’t heard of Pinterest yet, you will soon.  The popular new social site allows users to Pin items of interest onto virtual tack boards.  Links to cupcake recipes, interesting photography, Blackhawks players and wedding dresses have been inundating my feeds on both Facebook and Twitter, as people put together their boards.  The platform is still an invite only, VIP kind of site, but you can request an invitation anytime or receive one from a friend.  Here are the main things you need to know in order to speak Pinterest-ese.

Creating Boards

So, you've read through countless fun blogs from within and outside the industry and yes, you've smiled to yourself as you've had to thumb through silly posts about the author's dogs or sunglasses and/or other gimmicky things to keep you reading. And yes, you've gone a step above and read through more authoritative beats like Mashable or TechCrunch or HBR to yes, still find yourself having to smile and get through gimmicky articles on social media. 

And in that time frame of lost minutes  (and yes, hours), you were trained over and over to think that social media was about #fans #followers #tweets #comments #posts and other "measurements". Well, guess what they were wrong and you were wrong to believe it. These vanity metrics simply don't add up to leases or renewals. At the very stretch, they are ONLY good for brand lift, which you likely will ONLY consider once you can DEMONSTRATE you have a handle on building true marketing and leasing ROI. Otherwise, I give it to your boss to tell you to eat it and find something else better to do with your time.

And the reason is simple, we as an industry need to spend the very little time we do have to market (how many of you truly have a full-time dedicated marketing manager on site???) on getting a return from it.