#24- June 2020 Social Media Posting Plan for Your Apartment Community
Scroll down to listen to the podcast audio or watch the video to build out your marketing plan with me!
If you are an apartment property manager that has been struggling to keep up with it all at your community (and heck, at life) the last couple of months, you are not alone, my friend! I have been thinking about you. I know how challenging it has been to deal with quarantine, social distancing, and now for many reopening their leasing office doors. (Are we ready?)
In addition to keeping yourself safe and healthy, you are trying to come up with fun ways to keep residents engaged through virtual events. You are still committed to reaching your occupancy goals even though you are limited in what you can do for outreach marketing. And I know you want to keep showing up on your apartment’s social media platforms. All on top of regular day-to-day operations. Whew…can I just say it: THAT IS A LOT!
So I was thinking that for the next few months, I would share apartment marketing and retention ideas for social media to help simplify at least one of the things on your to do list.
How does that sound? Let me be your social media posting bestie. Let’s do it together.
Alright friend, Just follow these steps
Once you submit your email, check your inbox for instant access to your planning kit.
Step 2: Click play on the video or audio below to build your social media plan for june 2020 with me!
In this training I’m going to show you…
How to use the Creative Holidays (with your calendar) to create engaging content for the month.
How to schedule (using your checklist) a good mix of posts to cover outreach marketing, resident retention, engagement, share the latest news with your residents, and more!
Stick with me to the end of the training where I share two tools to simplify your social media marketing efforts even further.
Using creative holidays to build out your apartment’s marketing strategy
June 3rd: EGG DAY
Why do we love to start with the creative holidays for the month when building out our social media marketing and retention strategy?
Creative holidays are already TRENDING on social media. Smart apartment marketers know that piggybacking on what is already popular can give your marketing efforts the traction and momentum to make them successful. There is ZERO reason to reinvent the wheel trying to come up with apartment marketing ideas. So by adding a hashtag that is trending (think #nationalwineday) along with some more specific hashtags for your community and neighborhood, you increase your post’s opportunities for exposure.
Creative holidays are FUN. Let’s be real… life just hasn’t been that fun lately. The non-stop news of COVID-19 can bring even the most positive person down. But by focusing on the unusual (and sometimes silly) creative holidays we can be a bright spot in the social feed of our prospective renters and current residents.
June has over 20 creative holiday for the month. Here are a few of our favorites:
June 5th: Donut Day
June 11th: Make Life Beautiful Day
June 19th: Flip Flop Day
Don’t forget to grab your fillable PDF calendar at the top of this page to see them all and start planning.
Using Creative Holidays to Focus on Your occupancy and Retention Goals
I want you to remember RULE #1 of Social Media Marketing for Apartments:
We don’t post without purpose!
What does that mean? Just because we are using fun, creative holidays to post on social media doesn’t mean that we are just throwing up a random date like BFF day for the heck of it.
Let me give you an example:
June 8th is BFF day! Whoop, whoop!
You could share a post like this:
Today is #NationalBFFDay! ______ Apartments wants to give a shout out to all the awesome BFF’s.
What’s wrong with that post?
Nothing…if you like posting just for the sake of posting. Ok, sarcasm aside…this post does NOTHING for any of your marketing and retention goals. NOTHING!
Use Your Apartment’s Social Media to Post with Purpose
A better post:
Think of your best friend. You miss them, you love them and you want what's best for them. Being your neighbor can be just that! Tag them in the comments and tell them what you love about living at _____ Apartments.
Is it our _____(amenity or feature)? Or maybe it's our ______ (amenity or feature)! Remember: Friends make the BEST neighbors! #NationalBFFDay (Add any custom hashtags for your community)
Note: Only feature amenities or parts of your community that are open and accessible at the moment or modify the post to say which amenities can you not wait to enjoy again.
Let’s dissect this post:
Image + Opening Sentence = ATTENTION GRABBING (AKA: STOP THE FINGER SCROLL)
Think of your best friend. You miss them, you love them and you want what's best for them.
Call-To-Action To Generate Engagement:
Tag them in the comments and tell them what you love about living at _____ Apartments.
Why this works:
People like to share about themselves. When they engage with your posts it tells the social algorithms, “Hey…this is good content. Let’s show more people content like this.”
It trains your audience to engage with your posts in an easy way.
Personalize Your Community: Sell Without Selling
Is it our _____(amenity or feature)? Or maybe it's our ______ (amenity or feature)!
Why this works: Not everyone is going to take this step and share what feature or amenity they love, but others that see this post will get to know a little bit about your community’s selling points without you selling directly.
BONUS POINTS: In addition to the graphic above, you could also include two pictures of the amenities you mention. Take it a step further and run a POLL on Instagram Stories where people vote on which amenity they love more. All of that equals ENGAGEMENT, which is social media GOLD!
A Good Balance of Marketing & Retention Posts
We want our social media feed to include a good balance of posts that drive new prospects. This ultimately increases our occupancy and resident retention to keep high renewal rates and low turnover rates.
Our social media checklist helps you make sure that you have these types of posts every month:
Outreach Marketing Including:
☐ Highlight a Preferred Employer ☐ Neighborhood Feature ☐ Spotlight a Floor Plan or Special ☐ Showcase a Community Amenity ☐ Renting vs. Buying ☐ Testimonials ☐ FAQ ☐ Student Housing & Senior: Target the “decision-maker” or “decision-influencer”
Referrals Including:
☐ Tag a Friend That.... ☐ Benefits Of Having a Friend Live Nearby ☐ Referral Bonus
Resident Retention & Engagement Including:
☐ Team Highlight ☐ Welcome New Residents ☐ Renewals ☐ Events + Reminders
Notices to Keep Residents in the Loop
Tools to help automate your apartment’s social media
I hope at this point you are starting to feel confident that you can use the Creative Holiday calendar and the checklist to schedule out your social media for the month. Once you get these things scheduled, you are freed up to post live, in-the-moment posts and you never have to stress that you haven’t posted enough.
You might be wondering, is there a way to make this even easier??
The answer is yes! I want to share two tools that I personally use in managing our Sprout Marketing social platforms.
Simply Social: Done-For-You Captions + Graphics for Your Feed
The first is a tool that we created to simplify the process of coming up with captions and graphics.
So I’ll start there.
If you like the BFF caption above with fun graphic, you’ll be happy to know that the Simply Social by Sprout Marketing program gives you 40+ pre-written caption templates to make your own PLUS matching digital graphics that will STOP THE SCROLL. You get all the creative holidays for the month, evergreen posts you can post all year long and seasonal posts that make sense for the month.
Every single month you can knock out your social media in less than an hour with these three easy steps:
Download all the graphics with ONE click.
Copy and paste the captions into your feed.
Voila! Pop the bubbly because you are done. (Rosé not included with membership!) I think it will be, hands down, the best $29 you’ll spend. (Pssst…if you grab the calendar above, there is a good chance you’ll get a little coupon for added savings! 😉)
Smarterque: A Scheduling Tool
Y’all…I’ve tried a lot of scheduling tools. Including Buffer, Hootsuite, MeetEdgar, and I’m sure there is more. But I finally landed on Smarterqueue and I really love the simplicity.
I use it to post to Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can also use it to post to your Facebook Groups.
It’s so simple to use and I show you how in the video above.
My FAVORITE part is that you can add categories and visually see that you are posting enough of the right things we talked about earlier. Use your social posting checklist to create categories in Smarterqueue.
Take Action: Schedule June’s Social Media Posts
Alrighty, friends! Did I do it? Did I convince you that we should be marketing besties? At the very least, my goal is to give you social media ideas to implement for your apartment community in the month of June.
If you want to be online besties, I like to hang out on Instgram. Stop by and say hello. For real…nothing makes my day more! And if you have another bestie (first of all, how dare you), introduce them to The Marketing Home, Marketing You podcast so we can all hang out.
If this workshop was helpful, would you do this girl a solid and leave me a 5 star rating (and maybe a few sweet words) on iTunes?
Meet my real-life BESTIE, Lauren: We’ve been best friends since we were kids and Sprout business partners for 10+ years.
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Need consistent help with your apartment marketing? Schedule a demo to see how we can work together.