A big benefit of Facebook – arguably THE biggest benefit for property managers – is the ability to capture, understand and leverage resident feedback. Traditionally, gathering customer feedback was difficult and often expensive. With channels like Facebook, this is simply no longer the case as your residents can easily interact with your property on your Facebook page. Now, keeping in mind that comments can swing both ways – positively and negatively – you need to ensure that you have the tools in place to respond to and understand resident feedback.

Engaging with residents is critical since Facebook has become such an influential part of your prospective residents’ research process. A community that has a vibrant Facebook page and interacts well with residents makes a great impression on future residents. So what’s the best way to analyze and utilize resident feedback? Read on to learn about some helpful tools and tactics.

Make a good first impression
At this point you should be well versed in the features and benefits of Facebook Timeline for business pages (if not, read this). Your Timeline Wall is much like a brick and mortar retail store’s showroom – it’s where customers get a sense of your product, and it’s often the first place they interact with your brand. As such, it can have a huge impact on a resident’s opinion of your property. To keep your Timeline in ‘showroom shape’ and showcasing positive resident comments, we recommend the following best practices:

• Review your Timeline often. Answer questions, respond to comments, and in general, engage directly with your residents.

• Fortunately, Facebook has improved its Administrator Panel to make management easier by providing tools such as (1) being able to directly respond to wall comments and (2) aggregating all comments and posts in one central location so you don’t need to constantly scour your Timeline wall looking for comments.

• Leverage the Marketplace Recommendations application. With the Recommendations app, you’re able to quickly solicit and manage testimonials from your residents.

Recommendations are a powerful source of credibility for your community that builds trust instantly. The Recommendations app enables you to email your residents directly with a request for the recommendation and even allows you to provide an incentive (e.g. a $5 Starbucks gift card for writing a recommendation) if you’re so inclined. You also have the ability to manage the approval process, so if you prefer to ensure the recommendation is an accurate portrayal of your community before it gets posted, you can do so. These recommendations appear within the app on your Timeline page and also appear with your property within the Marketplace Network – increasing your reach with exposure on more than 150 classified sites in Oodle’s network.

Using Facebook for feedback
Another significant benefit of Facebook is the ability to test new business ideas and understand how your residents will react to them. Considering new pool hours? Create a poll for your residents using the Facebook Questions feature and see how residents respond to the idea. Thinking about repainting the units? Why not gather direct feedback on colors from your residents and have them decide via a vote on their favorite color? This type of engagement helps your residents build a deeper bond with your community and also enables you to lower your turnover costs as you forge longer-term relationships with your residents.

People often joke that there isn’t a need for formal focus groups anymore with the advent of social media, and they have a point. With the ability to capture and understand resident feedback so easily on Facebook, businesses that don’t leverage it as a tool will struggle to keep up with their competition.

How have you used Facebook to get resident feedback at your community?