How to Streamline Your Apartment’s Facebook Reputation Management

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Learning how to streamline your Facebook reputation management for your apartments is an important part of your social media strategy. Your Facebook page isn’t just a webpage. It’s a tool that prospects and current residents use to communicate with your staff.

Whether a visitor has questions about your property, or a resident is trying to leave a review, they expect you to engage with their posts and reviews.

Facebook reputation management includes moderating and responding to posts and reviews. This can be a time drain if you don’t have the right strategy and tools. If you’re moderating for more than one property, it can quickly feel overwhelming. By streamlining your reputation management and moderation you can ensure you’re responding to communications quickly and according to brand standards without getting sucked into the Facebook time drain.

Create a Facebook Reputation Management Strategy to Streamline Your Efforts

The first thing you need to do to gain control over your Facebook reputation management is to set up your strategy. You want to be able to be consistent and attend to your prospects’ needs while respecting your leasing agents’ time. Here are some decisions you’ll need to make when crafting your strategy.

Choose your channel(s)

Managing many social media channels is hard. The key to success is choosing one channel, such as Facebook, to start and then add others if needed. So ask yourself: where are your followers most active and where do you already have a presence? What channel is easiest for your leasing agents to respond in?

For many properties this channel may be Facebook, but for others it may be Instagram or Twitter.

Decide who’s the best person to respond to comments

Your prospects and residents probably want to talk to a leasing agent at the apartment. The risks are that leasing agents can get busy or may not be added to notifications of new responses. If you have a large company with many properties you may also be concerned that your leasing agents stay on brand and tone.

There’s three response approaches you can take. The first kind is a top-down approach where someone from corporate responds to messages and posts. The second type is a bottom-up approach where only local leasing agents respond. The final type is a hybrid where leasing agents respond but their responses have to be approved or from a specific template.

Set a notification and response strategy

It’s important to respond to private messages and comments in a timely manner. First, this creates a better experience for potential and current residents. Second, Facebook typically rewards business pages that have a quicker message response time.

Yet you don’t want your staff spending all day with Facebook open waiting for comments. What you can do is set up notifications for new comments or reviews. Then decide how quickly you want your staff to respond to those comments. You can set up a contingency plan for who will respond to comments if the main leasing agent is busy or not at the office.

Design automated responses

The final way to streamline your posts, especially if you have multiple properties, is to set up templates for recurring questions and comments. Did someone give one of your properties a 5-star review? Get a notification and have an automated response. Is someone asking a generic question about your amenities? Have an automated response. This way you can keep your responses consistent and save your team time.

As part of your strategy, decide when to use automated responses and when to customize your responses to questions.

Finding Tools for Apartment Facebook Reputation Management

Once you have your strategy mapped out, it’s time to decide which tools you’ll use.

Facebook

You can manage your reputation management and moderation directly through Facebook. If you have many properties and pages, you’ll want to sign up for Facebook Locations so you can manage them from one interface.

Although Facebook offers its tools for free, there are some drawbacks. Notifications can be difficult to set up and receive. Permissions at the local and corporate level can be tricky to maintain. 

While you can send one general post to all of your properties, you can’t customize the post for each property. You also will need to go into the properties one by one to respond to comments or private messages.

Paid Software Solutions

There are paid software solutions such as our own Spark Social and other programs that let you moderate Facebook and other social media platforms from one interface.

With these platforms you can:

  • Customize moderation permission and access per property
  • Have one interface at the corporate level to see all comments and reviews from every property and respond to them all from one page. You can filter posts and reviews, which saves you hours of time.
  • Set up templates to quickly respond to posts
  • Get notifications for certain comments or reviews such as if someone posts a review less than 3 stars or someone has sent you a private message.

Start Streamlining Your Apartment’s Facebook Reputation Management Today

Managing your apartment’s Facebook reputation management doesn’t have to eat up your time or frustrate you. If you set up the right strategy and use the right tools, you can communicate right where you clients want you to be.

If you want help setting up your social media strategy or want to try out Spark Social, give us a call today at 317-934-2242 or fill out the form below for a free consultation.

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Photo Credit: 123rf.com/olegdudko

Automated Email That Increases NOI Of New Residents

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Most apartment manager’s focus on email marketing automation is on ensuring prospects turn into leases and that they maintain a healthy balance of lease renewals. This is a great way to help boost NOI (Net Operating Income) for any property.

But there is another way to boost NOI with the right email automation. That is through the promotion of ancillary services or resident utilities such as phone, internet, cable, security systems, electricity, etc. With rents softening across the country it is more important than ever that we maximize the NOI of our properties, and ancillary service offerings coupled with email automation can help do that.

Ancillary services have been a common way to boost NOI for a while, whether you have contracts in place with the Comcast, Verizon, Time-Warner, AT&T, and other ancillary service providers of the world. However, if you don’t advertise those services to your residents, you’re missing out on potential revenue.

We know many property management companies that already have agreements in place that don’t advertise or tell residents about “preferred” service providers. The resident might find out about it through their welcome packet, but that might not be enough for the new resident to take action.

Part of the problem with those welcome packets is that they are paper. The average millennial today is digitally-native and usually hates paper. And the generation after isn’t much different in their regards for paper. Instead of looking through the welcome packet to find a cable provider’s contact info to set up the installation, they’re probably going to search it online and click a button. And who they choose might not be a provider you have a revenue-sharing agreement with. A better way to deliver all the info needed would be through email. And don’t think that putting the info in a PDF inside the email is sufficient. That’s almost as bad as a paper welcome packet since it requires the same amount of digging through a document.

Remember, that when you move into a new apartment, you often already have a lot of physical paperwork (lease agreements, change of address forms, insurance docs, etc.). And any additional paper would just get lost or ignored.

Sending The Ancillary Services Welcome Email

So how do you write/build this email and how do you email this to customers? There are a handful of steps that you need to take.

  • Identify who is moving in and when as well as who is going to renew
  • Identify the services you want to highlight
  • Write the email as a welcome to help them get set up with their necessary services
  • Automate the send date to target the resident’s move-in date
  • Warn prospective residents the email is coming
  • Track performance and adjust as needed

Identify Who Is Moving In:

If you can’t easily tell who is moving in and when through your property management software, then sending emails about your ancillary services won’t work. So you need to have this data available to be integrated into your email program of choice. Luckily, we can help you set up those integrations.

But, don’t forget about the lease renewals. Many customers switch providers after a year to get new deals or they might be looking to add a service as well. So make sure you have an email with custom text.

Identify The Services:

Do you already have ancillary service contracts with phone, cable, internet, utilities, etc? How do they work? Do they need to sign up through a phone number or website? Do you get money from everyone who chooses that service no matter what? Are there other service providers they can sign up with that you don’t have an agreement with?

Once you know what you can and can’t offer, and if they need a special phone number or landing page or not, you need to identify what are the services someone is going to want ready on move-in day. Limit your email to only those types of services so you have the most relevant info. It will make them hold onto the email longer and make it shorter and more relevant.

If you don’t have ancillary service contracts or there are gaps in your coverage we have partners that close sales for phone, internet, security, cable, satellite, wireless and more at a better rate than most telcos and can give you a bigger payout. Just reach out and we will run your properties to figure which services you can fill the gaps on and what average payouts might look like.

Write The Email:

A few critical things to think about when you are writing that email:

  • Make sure the subject line lets them know this is important and will save them time in signing up for services.
  • Keep the email short to the critical utility services.
  • Make all the services available in the email. They simply want to be able to click a phone number or link to connect with the service provider. Make the shortest path possible to contact the provider.
  • Let them know of special offers from providers in the email.
  • If you have multiple contracts or ability to make back money from the same service give them a choice.
  • Disclose your relationship to the providers in the email

Remember they will refer back to this email if it is relevant as they go one by one set up their services. They’ll love having an easily accessible resource with every essential service listed out that is available at your property because they won’t have to research who is and isn’t available.

Automate The Email:

This is what really makes you money. You make this automated and then your team doesn’t ever have to send it again. To automate this your property management software has to already be connected to your email provider and that email provider must be able to send automated emails based on triggers.

In this case, the main email triggers will be based on the prospect’s move-in date. A good target would be to shoot for 30 days prior to a move-in date, but you can change that based on your residents’ particular needs.

Warn New Move-ins The Email Is Coming:

You have to warn new residents the email is coming. Even let them know to add you to their contacts list so it won’t get sorted into a Promotions Tab or other niche inbox. This lets them know that you have them covered and increases the likelihood they open the email. The more likely they open the email the better your open rates and the better your email deliverability will be, meaning fewer emails going in spam or the promotions tab.

Track Performance and Adjust:

Ensure you track not only open rates but who is clicking your links and calling your numbers if at all possible. This should help you better estimate revenue from the email and know how to adjust it to see if you should be making edits to improve performance. Some ways to improve performance include writing a better headline or reorganizing the email to promote the most profitable services first. Your imagination is the limit here.

So if you are looking to improve NOI, this is just one more way to get more out of those ancillary services. Also, if you combine this email with other important email automation, which is easy to do with the right system, then you have a great way to improve NOI for more than just ancillary services. So give us a call at 317-934-2242 to help you put together the right email automation program.

How Apartment Managers Can Stop Playing The ILS Game

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Rent.com, Trulia, Zillow, Apartments.com – chances are your team deals with one or more of these or other apartment listing sites. And if they’re a big part of your business, you’re all too familiar with the high cost and headache that can come with staying competitive on those listing sites.

But what if you could stop being a slave to the ILS game, saving your company time, money, and making you look better than the competition?

There’s a way to stop playing the ILS game. What your team can do to lessen your reliance on ILS’s is to show up in more places online, and to build a better relationship with prospects.

Show Up In More Places, Get Vetted Leads, Lessen Your Apartment ILS Reliance

ILS companies play a numbers game: they get so much online traffic and so many eyes on their countless apartment listings that they can claim to get you X number of leads per month. The problem here is that these leads aren’t vetted whatsoever (except maybe by geography), and these prospects may be at any point in the decision process. So while you may end up with those X leads the ILS promised you, they’re low quality leads that will usually end up wasting your leasing team’s time chasing them.

When you diversify where your properties appear online, you’ll find that your leads will typically be more qualified, and they’re searching for what you’re offering, rather than just any random apartment.

Below are just a few places that most apartment companies can improve their presence.

Online Listings

When we talk about apartment listing management, we mean more than just ILS listings. Basically any record of your business, featuring your address, phone number, and URL can count as a listing. And ensuring that your properties are both present and that the info is consistent can increase awareness and improve your search engine rankings.

While you can take the time to manage your listings manually, it usually isn’t worth the several hours it will take for every property you manage. Typically, enlisting the help of a service like Yext Powerlistings or Resident Spark’s proprietary listing management software is a smarter way to go.

Social Media Advertising & Remarketing

The ad targeting features in Facebook, coupled with the ability to target people who’ve already visited your site via remarketing, are some of the best ways to land high-quality leads in the apartment space. Your team knows how selling is a multitouch process, and these tools help you facilitate those touchpoints.

Email

Email marketing, particularly drip campaigns for prospects, is one of the best ways to increase awareness and keep your properties at the forefront of your prospects’ minds. Because email is one of the few places you can have some control over when your prospects receive a message, it offers a unique advantage for multifamily companies.

SEO

We’ll be honest, no matter how much you invest in SEO for your apartments, you’re probably never going to outrank the big ILS websites when people search for “apartments in my area.” However, a good chunk of people searching on Google don’t want to deal with an ILS, they want to see individual apartment sites. Improving your search engine rankings to land at least on the first page can land you qualified leads, especially those who are looking for an apartment in a very specific area, or one that offers specific amenities like pet-friendly apartments or a fitness center.

Build a Better, More Memorable Relationship With Prospects

Getting your properties’ names out in a number of places is a good start to get qualified leads, but one of the most effective ways to close those leads is to create a personalized customer journey.

Having multiple touchpoints over time is more likely to result in long-term residents and successful sales funnels than sinking huge money into an ILS. In that way creating a better relationship with your prospects ties directly into showing up in more places online.

Creating Multiple Touchpoints for Potential Customers

Two of the most effective ways to build an ongoing relationship with prospects are through email and remarketing. But to take full advantage of these tools, you need to be able to use prospect data from your Property Management Software (PMS) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software.

By integrating your PMS or CRM with your email and remarketing efforts, you’re able to stay in contact with prospects when they’re most likely to be receptive to your messages. For example, a fully-fledged email program can automate emails to be sent to anyone who:

  • Scheduled a tour or just recently completed a tour of your property.
  • Requested pricing information for an apartment unit.
  • Expressed interest in your apartment close to a year ago and didn’t move in, but may be looking for a new apartment again this year.
  • Has filled out an application for your apartment community.

Likewise, a remarketing campaign can use a prospect’s previous interaction with your apartment (internet history, how much time they’ve spent on your site, and more) to target a prospect specifically where they are in the decision process.

What both of these do is create a more personally tailored journey for a potential customer, both making them feel valued as a customer that you’re paying attention to them, as well as “nudging” them in the right direction with appropriate calls to action at different points in time. It creates a much more memorable experience than static ads and ILS listings, and when it comes to big decisions like where to live, the more personal you can be, the better.

How To Start Undoing Your ILS Shackles

Like most problems, the first step in fixing your ILS reliance is realizing you have a problem. The second step? Get help. Resident Spark is helping multifamily and apartment management companies improve every facet of their client communication, and we can help yours as well. Schedule a call with us below to quit the ILS game, and take back control of your strategy.