How to Streamline Your Apartment’s Facebook Reputation Management

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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