Interesting Stats on Social Media Sharing & Viral Marketing Amongst Renters

Hi everyone,

Recently our company held a huge promotion called the RentPayment Sweepstakes that awarded a $10,000 Grand Prize. Instead of doing our traditional advertising for promotions (like shipping printed materials to participating properties), we did very little advertising and experimented with using social media and viral marketing to let renters spread the word about the promotion to each other.

The results was surprisingly successful and we gathered a lot of interesting data on which social media channels renters out there are using the most, plus which channels they use to share news and information. In addition, we also determined which channels were most valuable by determining which actually generated the most traffic to our website.

I'd like to share these stats with you!

In the 5 month promotional period, the sweepstakes had close to 1,000,000 entries from over 300,000 eligible renters! All of this traffic, without using our traditional marketing/advertising methods. How? We let the renters speak for us!

Residents were able to "share" the Sweepstakes through Email, Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace with neighbors, roommates and friends. The chart below shows the percentage of “shares” (emails, messages, status updates or tweets) that were sent among these various channels. The highest percentage of shares were via email - about 2,000 emails! This shows how powerful email is as a marketing tool for communication with renters. As expected, I’d like to also point out that Facebook is the most popular of the social networking sites among our renters for sharing information.




We also looked at the ability of these four channels to actually draw traffic our site. (Shown in the chart below) These results show that as a communication tool email had the greatest call-to-action, accounting for 98% of the total website traffic from all sources combined. Out of the three social networking sites, Facebook generated 91% of the total traffic and Twitter generated the other 9% showing that Facebook sharing was the most valuable traffic source, but MySpace sharing has next to no value.




All in all, one fact our team learned from this is that Facebook is the most used and the most valuable of all the Social Networking sites (atleast amongst our renters). Also, Email is an extremely valuable tool for the Multifamily industry - but one we see as very underused! Alot of Property Managers we work with still do not collect email addresses, which shocks me. Do you collect email addresses at your property? Our advice is for Property Managers to take advantage of email as a communication channel for prospecting, operational efficiencies and to distribute promotional offers to build renter satisfaction.


Hope this information helps!
Elizabeth

Great stuff, Elizabeth ... it's always helpful to see real examples. I completely agree that email is underutilized as a marketing tool. What do you think are some good ways that property management companies could use email to reach a broader audience without promoting their current specials?

What tools were used to compile this data?

This is a really great post Elizabeth. Thanks for sharing. I also TOTALLY agree with you and Mike Whaling when you both mentioned that resident e-mail collection is not good or industry wide. I'd also like to add the word -- pathetic. Ok. Two words. Seriously pathetic.

One of my clients is reliant on resident e-mails to perform their service. I generally find that only 1 out of 3 apartment managers have managed to collect more than 25% of their residents e-mail addresses. Why? They don't ask for them. (Thud. That's me falling off my desk chair when I hear this).

So again, seriously, how hard is it to ask for an e-mail address from your resident? Management companies asks for a ton of other information -- but tend to miss a very important key to communication.

Becomes extremely frustrating when a management company wants to use my clients services -- but can't because they don't have the residents e-mail address.

Just my $.02 -- but I think most multifamily folks will agree on this one.

We simply must get better at getting the email address. Add it to the resident contact cards, add the question to the check in sheet. Who doesn't use email? We don't want to miss an opportunity to engage where our residents are already communicating. What a great way to welcome new tenants, with an email or free e-card upon move in. Really great post Elizabeth and thanks for sharing.

Thanks for your feedback.

We used Google Analytics to see the web traffic, and our development team built special tracking links to count whenever anyone shared the Sweepstakes via social media.

@Leigh -
You're speaking my language! As a marketer, and someone whose preferred method of communication is email, I can't believe the low prevalence of email in apartment communities.

My company is a vendor to the multifamily industry, but I work with Property Managers frequently and have done a lot of on-site visits to clients. Last year, we made a trip to Texas to visit with student housing properties and we asked them a lot of questions, including how they communicate with residents. I learned that about 90% of communication is still done by printing hundreds of paper flyers and posting them door to door. And this was student housing, a more tech-saavy renter group.

Also - not just emailing is the answer, but emailing effectively. Good content and effective use are key for email to be an extremely powerful tool!

Its easy to collect residents emails. Everytime residents renew, we ask for their email and tell them that we are going green. We would like to email them a copy of their lease for their records. Many residents then thrilled to share the email. Who does not want to be environmentally friendly these days? It also great tool for follow ups etc. Emails are often not asked, but often easy to collect. Its perfect for todays communications. If most of your clients find you on line, then most of your clients would love to be in touch via email.

best,

I have been using email for awhile at the properties I manage(d) and love it! We are in a college town as well and most of our residents prefer to have this option for convenience. We collect the emails when entering our prospects into our system, then follow through during the lease term by asking them to update their information periodically (With Move In Inspections, Renewals, etc).

It has not only been a convenience for our residents, but a time saver for our staff. Instead of spending the time it takes to walk an entire property putting out general notices we are able to do so in a click with a Resident Distribution list in Outlook. This can be set up for the entire property, or smaller groups by building, etc.

When it comes to individual notices we can do that through our property system. We are able to send courtesy late notices, minor violation letters, service requests updates,etc. directly from the residents file window (working through Word and pasting the letter into the systems email feature). This feature also logs the "letter" in an Activity tab that we can edit to state we emailed it instead of printed.

As a perk the residents with emails on file get advance notice of special events and renewal offers. We still have a few people that do not want to provide their email to us so we keep a list of those residents to insure they still get notices on their door.

I encourage you all to embrace technology as an additional hand! A little set-up time and regular maintenance can save you time, supplies and headaches.

We've been experimenting with social media as well, testing different apps, graphics etc. The geek in me loves this stuff! In fact, I would love to get my hands on a property and take it for a test drive. I have a few ideas that I think in theory would be cool but need a property manager willing to try it out. Anyone interested in trying out a few Fanpage strategies? We could measure the results and post it here. Let me know. It could be fun!

Kelly Blackmore
Creator at Resident Press