How to win new customers and high engagement with Instagram
There are multiple social media channels to choose from when marketing your community. We love Instagram because its lower barrier of entry means that anyone with a smart phone can participate on the platform. For us that equates to a very large pool of renters aka multiple target audiences. That being said, just because a social media channel is easy to use, doesn’t mean all your marketing know how should go out the window. Our intern audited 50 property management and apartment community Instagram accounts. Unfortunately, there are a ton of people out there simply ‘doing it wrong’. Fear not! With this 5 minute checklist, you can make sure your accounts are #InstaReady.
-
Biography Biology
This seems obvious, but even we missed it on a couple of our accounts. Forget the marketing speak and state who, what, and where you are. 68% of the apartment community accounts we audited neglected to say in which city they were located! Also, seems like a no brainer, but don’t forget to mention you are an Apartment community. Your bio is the only place you can have a live link. Instead of just connecting to your homepage, think about linking to your current blog post or a landing page designed to capture traffic. On the @apartminty account you’ll often see the {temporary link in bio} caption. We update this to drive traffic to our most current listings.
2. What are you saying?
Think about it, you have two different audiences. You have your new, curious follower and then as someone who has been following you for months. Look at your account from the perspective of both. The new follower is probably going to actually go to your account page and look at the grid format of your gallery and see the last 12-24 pictures. Your loyal follower is probably just seeing the most recent post pop up in their feed. So how do you communicate your story to both? First look at your account in gallery mode. What do the most recent 12 photos say about you and your community? Do they speak to your neighborhood and location? Your service team? The apartments themselves? The lifestyle that can be expected? Instagram has truly become the place to appreciate beauty in all the small details in life…so you have plenty of content you just need to step back and plan your story. If you could only communicate to your prospect through Insta, what 12 topics would you want to cover with them? List those 12 ideas out and underneath each of them, think of multiple photos that you could take that represent each of those ideas. Use this brainstorm to shape your content calendar for upcoming posts.
3. Quality Cues
Please, please, PLEASE don’t post a blurry or dark photo. It’s the quickest way to turn off your audience. No, your photos don’t have to be professional quality, but take the time to edit them and put your best foot forward. What is your prospect learning from a blurry photo?
4. Captions
My old assistant’s nickname was Caption Obvious. Her captions never failed to overstate what anyone could already see. It would make us all giggle. Don’t be caption obvious. Instagram let’s you write a long form caption, so take the time to set the scene for your viewers….why should they care about this photo of a {wrench, cupcake, kitchen sink, barbell, etc} Be a storyteller. Help your prospects buy in.
5. #OhNoYouDidn’t
And while we are talking about captions, we HAVE to talk about hashtags. First of all do NOT put them in your bio. They do nothing for you up there. Second, while some experts recommend up to 30 hashtags, this just seems unnecessarily spammy. You’re not winning any friends with that one. Hashtags at the end of the day are an organization and search tool and in some cases just for comical/satirical relief. So use them accordingly. If you want to be able to find all of your travel pictures in a cinch, use a customized hashtag. {#HBTravels} The same goes for your building {#ApartmintyBTS brings up all of our office antics…that hashtag is more there for us and as a recruiting tool, so prospective employees can see what they are getting themselves into.} You can use #XYZApts to tag all your apartment photos for easy searching later. Then there are hashtags associated with your city #AsSeenInDC brings us cool pics from around the city, so when we capture a great shot on our rooftop, we’re definitely using that hashtag. What you don’t need to do…..what I’m begging you not to do is #AptLife #Apartments #Rental #ApartmentsFTW #Multifamily #1BR #ComeLiveHereToday #WeAreOpenComeSeeUs #WeHaveCupcakes….looks ridiculous, right?
So take a quick run through your accounts, get the basics in order and join us on our webinar! Next time we’ll dig into some easy photo editing tools, talk about consistency of story and flow, and the dos and don’ts of Insta engagement.