Do you find yourself aimlessly scrolling for way too much time on Instagram without ever really stopping to absorb any of the content you’re seeing?

If you’re doing it, you can bet your residents are doing it. And, they’re missing your posts. 

A quick way to tell if your audience is passing your posts is if there is a huge disparity between your follower number and the average likes per post you’re receiving. If you have 1,000 followers and are getting eight likes per post, your audience is frequently scrolling by you. 

While how active your followers are, the time you post, and how much you post are factors when it comes to engagement, there is still a good number of people who see every post.

So, how do you stop your residents from mindlessly scrolling past your posts and get them to engage with them, or at least read them?

I’ve got some recommendations for you:

1. Lean into your industry + being an apartment. 

It’s likely your residents aren’t following many apartments on Instagram; you might be the only one. 

So while the majority of their feed is filled with posts from brands and influencers, you have the chance to stand out with apartment-centered images. This includes pictures of apartment units, community amenities, and event announcements as well as tips and tricks for renters. This might seem obvious but it can be easy to try to copy what is trendy or popular at the moment rather than burrow down on your industry.

As an apartment, you also have the perfect opportunity to share really cool pictures of home decor which is a great attention-grabber, especially for women. If your resident demographics (followers) show a majority of women, make sure your apartment is regularly sharing content surrounding decor. 

2. Post bold images with a short amount of text. 

The word “short” in this recommendation is key. 

Having a little bit of text on your image is a great way to interrupt a feed of monotonous images but too much text can ruin your chances of having the viewer read your post. 

People don’t have much patience for text online. Most people will only read 30% of the words on a page. 

If your post is a page, make sure only around 30% is text. Here’s a great example: 

This is also a great example of an image that is bold.  

Would you not pause your scrolling if this popped up on your feed? 

3. Post images of residents. 

I’ve recently discovered that my clients receive 38% more engagement on posts that feature current residents or are reposts of pictures residents themselves share on their personal accounts. 

One of the best features of Instagram is the “tagged” tab on your apartment’s profile. It is the icon you see on the right: 

Anytime someone shares a post where you are tagged in the image, in the caption, or as the location, it will show up here. 

This makes it incredibly easy to scroll through and choose images to reshare to your page. Plus, residents will love pictures of them or their photos being featured. 

Here are some great examples of resident-taken photos:

It’s no secret that people like to look at pictures of other people, just look at our world of “influencers.” Pictures of people are popular. 

Ten times out of ten, a picture of a person in their apartment will get more engagement than just a picture of the apartment itself.

Whenever you can, share images of people in your apartment community.