What should our goal be?

Let’s be honest with ourselves, we probably won’t get a lot of rents from Facebook. In its best and simplest form, social media should be used as a way to create a virtual sense of community with our residents. Many of our senior apartments have a close-knit community based on shared activities. With social media we are trying to create a VIRTUAL sense of community. The more engaged your residents are, the better resident retention you’ll have. You may even be able to get some referrals from your happy residents. (And hey, what’s to stop you from printing out your Facebook page & attaching it to your brochures to show potential residents the amazing virtual community you have?)

How can you save time?

In that study I read, it stated that one small business owner was spending 5 hours or more a week updating her Facebook. Twenty plus hours a month is a huge time commitment to a platform that probably isn’t going to get you one single rent. Nobody I know has that kind of time available.

So how can we save time? Many vendors, like ForRent, offer a social media platform. Even giving you content that you can auto-populate ahead of time. However, these services can be expensive. Thankfully, there are many reasonably-priced resources out there that allow you to control all your accounts in one place. These are what I like to call “social media bundling” websites.

Hootsuite.com and Vertical Response have a nominal cost and you can update several different platforms at once. You’re able to updated unlimited Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Wordpress accounts, all at the same time. Using these tools, it can take less than an hour to do a whole month’s worth of posting, compared to the business owner doing 20 hours a month.

What about our on-site teams?

Of course you can, and should, have your on-site teams post property-specific content on Facebook. However, keep in mind that the teams often have little to no training in social media and that you are relying on them to represent your company…Online, a place where once something is posted, even if deleted, never, EVER really goes away.

Having a centralized social media content creator is a wonderful way to make sure that everything has the same “voice” and you know it represents the image that you want to relay.

Finally, what do we post?

One of the biggest time-wasters is sitting in front of a blank computer screen with a blank mind, trying to figure out what to post. To avoid this, make a weekly schedule and stick to it for the whole month. Keeping in mind that you’re trying to engage your residents, why not do a daily lifestyle post?

Mondays might be healthy living articles, Tuesdays could be money saving tips, Wednesdays 30-minute recipes, Thursdays and Sundays could be some sort of fun content (quizzes, trivia, a great quote), Friday could be cleaning or decorating tips, Saturday might be going green articles or patio decorating ideas. The idea is to streamline it, while still providing information that is engaging.

Whatever you do, do NOT make every post an ad. At most, if you absolutely have to, make one out of ten posts an ad. If you’re trying to create a sense of community and engage people, constant advertising isn’t going to make that happen. In fact, it’s one of the fastest ways to turn people off.

Just following these few simple guidelines; knowing your goals, finding ways to save time, watching who is posting on your company’s behalf and what you should and shouldn’t post, you can revitalize your social media platform and engage more people.

(Originally published by Shellie in IREM OC's The Source 2013 Q2 online magazine)