Attracting new renters and retaining current ones has never been easier than now. With some savvy social media marketing you can better position yourself as the first port of call for anyone looking for their next rental property.
Target Gen Y
Generation Y are the biggest demographic looking for rental properties now. These are the people whose attention you need to grab. And that’s why social media is where you need to be broadcasting yourself loud and clear.
Generation Y are known for being glued to their smart phones, so that’s where your marketing attention should be focused. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest all give you access directly to these potential clients. If your business doesn’t have a Facebook page, it might as well not exist to Gen Y’s.
Make Your Marketing Mobile Friendly
We’ve established that a large majority of your potential tenants spend a large majority of their time on social media, but how are they accessing that social media? Gone are the days of the one-desktop-computer-per-household. Now, it’s all about smartphones. Optimizing your web content so that it is mobile friendly is critical for keeping people on your site.
Some social media platforms are primarily accessed through the smart phone. The best example of this is Instagram. Maintaining an Instagram account with pictures or walk-through videos of your properties is a great way to advertise what you have on offer. Clever use of hashtags will lead people looking to rent straight to your account and your website.
Ask for Reviews
There’s nothing more powerful to sway someone’s opinion than that of their family and friends. Good reviews on social media go an incredibly long way. Set up a Google Reviews, True Local, and Yelp profile and ask your best clients to leave a review for you. This is a great way to promote yourself to prospective tenants or landlords looking for a property manager.
Profile Your Clients
Social media is all about engagement. The beauty is that with one like, comment or share on your content, hundreds of other people will see this. When new tenants move into one of your properties, ask if you can take a photo and post it on social media. By tagging those tenants in your post which advertises your success, all of their followers see it as well as yours, casting that net wider for potential clients.
Encourage Interaction
Another way to increase engagement and reach more people is by crafting social media posts which prompt other users to respond. Research has shown that posts which are framed as a question are far more successful in engagement than those which end in a full stop. Posting an image of a property with a caption such as “Who would like to live in this beautiful sandstone bungalow?” will do better than “Sandstone bungalow for rent.”
Encouraging people to “tag someone who…” is a great way to advertise properties to people who are looking for something in particular that you can deliver. “Tag someone who would love this pool in their backyard!” will result in people tagging their contacts who they know are looking for this particular feature in a property. Your followers will be doing your hard work for you!
Search Engine Optimization
With multiple, active and engaging social media accounts, your ranking on search results pages will improve. This is an indirect benefit of an active social media marketing campaign. You want to be front and center when someone Googles “property managers in insert-your-area-here”, and the first step toward that is through linking your social media accounts to your webpage.
Maintaining a presence on social media is an essential part of the marketing strategy for property managers. Not only is it the easiest way to find and engage with the current (and future) generation of renters, but it’s a simple way to get your message out quickly. Using the power of social media you can engage with more future clients and allow current clients to advocate for you, and ultimately keep your occupancy rates high.
