Facebook

1. Give prospective residents an incentive to check-in at your community. Consider waiving or reducing their application fee if they check-in while in your office. What’s the big deal about checking in? Hello! When they check in, ALL their friends see YOUR community name. And the more other peeps see your name, the better the chance they’ll like your page. 

2. Hold a contest at your community to increase engagement on your page. Do you have great views? How about a “Hit us with your best shot” contest, or a pretty patio contest. Give people who are scoping out your page plenty of things to look at and they will continue to come back. 

3. And last, but not least ASK! Not many people can really read minds. If you want people to like your page, you need to ask them and make sure they know where to go. Add your Facebook URL to all your marketing pieces, t-shirts, stickers for packages at the office, everything! Make sure no one leaves your office without this information. 

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?

I recently came across a great marketing picture shared by an apartment community, and I immediately thought it would be something fun to share on MFI.  So I called up the community to ask if that would be ok.  The conversation went something like this:

On-Site Employee:  You saw that picture?  How?

Me:  Well, it’s on your Facebook page…

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. 

It’s the question every property manager and industry partner wants to figure out: just how much does social media help build our brands, improve services, save money, and create new revenue?

I think it’s especially difficult to calculate social media’s rewards because they flow into many different buckets. I’m not implying this means we should shirk the responsibility of measuring ROI—but remember that there are benefits beyond leads, like branding, customer service, and SEO lift to marketing pages with proper social media integration.

It can take a long time to see that social media is generating leads, leases and sales, so we naturally try to justify our investment with other data, including increased page views, inbound traffic generation, SEO, and engagement.

Back in January 2011, Facebook introduced their newest advertising product; Sponsored Stories.  These ads, which live on the right hand column of Facebook, use people’s friends to endorse a brand and encourage them to engage as well.  For example, let’s say I Like Apartments.com on Facebook and then I write a status update that says “Searching for my new apartment on Apartments.com!”  If Apartments.com has purchased Sponsored Story advertising, my status update, along with the brand, will be promoted to my friends.  Essentially, Apartments.com would be using me as their brand advocate to my network on Facebook.

Starting this January, one year after their launch, Sponsored Stories will start to appear in a user’s newsfeed, instead of in the normal ad position on the right hand column. This new position will increase their visibility to users.  Although mobile users will not see Sponsored Stories with this roll-out, it’s rumored that the 350 million users will start to see ads starting in March.

Let me begin by wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah. For those of you who regularly read my scribbles, you are used to some pretty meaty topics. In light of the Holidays, this one will be a bit frothier. In each blog that I write there are certain themes which remain pretty consistent. One of my favorites is that real estate development is about the coolest industry on the planet. After all, our job is to make the world a better, more usable, more beautiful place.

Often my intended audience is the real estate developer (my hope is of course that there is some part of my subject matter which translates to my non-developer audience- or at least helps you better understand those temperamental developers who constantly tell you ‘We can’t afford that.’). Today, I would like to remind us all of something that is very easily glossed over as we perform our day-to-day tasks.

They have been talking about it for a while, but Facebook Timeline is officially launching.  This new view for profiles takes your life and puts it into; you guessed it, a timeline layout.  There are a lot of people asking why all the changes and can’t Facebook leave good enough alone?  It’s about providing a more user-friendly experience, said Kate Aronowitz, director of user experience and design for Facebook, in an interview yesterday morning.  Using the right hand control, users can quickly scroll through events, friends, photos, wall posts and more from any year in their life.  Although Facebook wasn’t around in 1970 (come to think of it, Zuckerberg wasn’t even around then), users can upload photos from that year to truly create a timeline of their life.

Timeline is still in its opt-in phase, but all users will be transitioned over soon.  I enabled it a few months ago to play with the usability and I really do like it.  I easily found wall posts from my college roommates that I had completely forgotten about.  Sure, I could have found these with my wall today, but the key word is easily.  These posts and other content are called Stories in Timeline.  You can star your favorites to highlight them and hide others you don’t want people to see.

Don’t be nervous about setting up Timeline.  Facebook is giving opt-in users a seven day grace period between setting it up and pushing it live to your friends.  Take some time to find a good Cover photo, which is everyone’s introduction to your profile (mine is from when the Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup) and get started.  For more information and to enable your Timeline, visit Facebook.com/Timeline.