Linking your Resident Portal to Twitter & Facebook
Posted on Fri, Feb 12, 2010
It is no secret that social media is one of the biggest trends online recently. No business can afford to ignore it, and why should you? With more than 400 million users on facebook, you can be sure many of your residents and prospects are on board.
The problem with Social Media is that it requires a very different marketing approach than traditional media. To be successful in creating a vibrant community who spread the word about your services, takes time and effort. It is nothing like running the same ad on a magazine or updating your CraigsList listings every once in a while with basically the same content. To be successful with Social Media you need to constantly create quality content that people are interested in.
Creating content is hard and many property and marketing managers end up defaulting to just running their specials on twitter or give up on social media all together. This is where your Resident Portal can be useful. As a company that manage Resident Portals, we witness first hand how much quality content is generated by the on-site team and the residents on a daily basis. Take last week for example, many of our clients organized Super Bowl parties in their resident lounges and clubhouses. They used their Resident Portal to announce it to the community, take head counts, run surveys on what type of food people would like and which team is more popular. This is exactly the type of activity prospects are looking to learn about, and that can make you stand out from the crowd. If you have a vibrant community, why not leverage it to attract more like-minded clients?
To make things easier on our clients (we know how busy you are) ActiveBuilding now lets you publish content directly from your Resident Portal to your Twitter account and facebook page. Every time one of our property managers send out a mass message or post an announcement on the website or the Lobby Display, they will now have the option to simply check a box and publish that content to facebook and/or Twitter. Those fire alarm test announcements are probably not very relevant, but many of the announcements related to events, social gathering, new photos, gym schedule, and cooking classes are exactly the type of quality content that can make your social media strategy successful and provide a true glance to outsiders on what it's like to live in your community.
What is your experience with Social Medial? Do you have a facebook account for your property and if so, how do you manage it? Use the comments below to share your thoughts.