How To Run Multiple Apartment Social Media Accounts

For apartment management companies, building a personal relationship on social media is a great way to convert prospects into leases and maintain a good renewal rate. Usually when a company has to manage Facebook for dozens of unique apartment communities, they’re stuck with one of two choices:

 

1 – Dedicate several hours to creating unique, engaging social media content for each location.

Or

2 – Miss out on connecting with potential prospects or current residents who might renew leases or refer you.

 

Both of those sound pretty awful, right? Fortunately, there are ways to approach multilocation social media that’s not a rock or a hard place. Here’s what to keep in mind when you have to run apartment social media on a large scale.

Use the Tools at Your Disposal

If you’re logging into each Facebook business profile separately to post social media updates, you’ve already lost the battle. In addition to the time you’re spending writing everything out for each location, you’re wasting time logging in and out of multiple accounts, and planning out each content schedule. That’s easily several hours each week depending on the number of properties you have.

Enlist the help of social media automation software. Services like Hootsuite, LavaSurf, and Buffer can eliminate that timesink, letting you manage all content scheduling from one central location. Say you want the same post published at roughly the same time to every apartment page – those tools can easily do so, in a fraction of the time it would take to do manually.

Any social media automation tool will have its own benefits and drawbacks. The one that best fits your company will depend on how many properties you have, the type of content you want to share, and how involved you want apartment managers to be. Figuring out that last one is an entirely different question unto itself.

Figure Out How Involved Individual Apartment Communities Should Be

For companies managing multiple apartment properties, there are basically 3 ways to manage social media:

1. All social media is handled at the top, (i.e. “corporate”).
2. All social media is handled by individual apartments.
3. Both the individual apartment and corporate are involved.

There’s potential benefit to each choice. With social media handled at the corporate level, you can guarantee consistent voice, on-brand language, and scheduled content. Handled at the individual apartment level, you can guarantee truly unique and local content, and a better chance of engagement.

For the majority of apartment management firms, option 3 offers the biggest upside, but it needs some structure. Take the time to answer these questions:

• Are the people submitting social media content at the individual apartment level familiar with company branding and messaging?
• Will all individual apartment teams have the same access to publishing content?
• Do you trust each team equally in their ability to push out regular, high quality social media content?

Depending on your answer to these, you’ll want to either increase or decrease certain employees’ involvement on social media. Using one of those software tools, you can set permission levels for users to vary how much input they have.

Vary That Content!

Creating unique and engaging content on social media is what helps build a relationship with prospects and current residents. If apartment managers are posting to social media, you’ll already have a steady stream of unique content. But if those managers aren’t involved, or they’re too busy with day-to-day work, it’s up to you.

Again, this is where a social media automation tool comes into play. More sophisticated tools like our own Spark Social will let you vary the copy, image, attached URLs, timing, and more on mass scheduled posts for multiple social accounts, giving the appearance of uniquely created posts. What’s more, varying the content across your properties can let you test out certain modifiers over time. That will let you figure out what imagery, words, and calls to action best resonate with specific audiences.

If this all seems like a lot of work, that’s because it is. But Resident Spark can help make that work easier, less time-consuming, and more productive. Schedule a demo today to see how.