How-to: Setting Up a Social Media Calendar
September 12, 2017 11:00 am 1 Comment
Social Media Calendars: What are they and why do you need them?
In apartment marketing, online presence is important. Facebook, snapchat, pinterest, instagram, and other social media sites can help residents find you and decide to lease from your building. Hubspot recently conducted a survey that found that 80% of businesses say that social media increased traffic to their websites.
So let’s say you’ve hopped on the social media bandwagon, and now need a way to stay organized. How much should you be posting, and how often? What time of day? How will you keep everything organized? While sites like Hootsuite and others offer paid services in order to keep your social media sites current, you can do it for free by making your own social media calendar.
How To Set Up A Social Media Calendar
Social media calendars keep you on track and organized. They give you specific times of day to post, which headlines you’ll use, which links and graphics you’ll include, and what hashtags you might type.
Your social media calendar can focus on five different social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and Blogging). It may also be beneficial to divide your calendar into the 6 categories below.
Time
This will tell you which time to post. Look into the suggested times of the day to post that are based on several apartment-related factors, but ultimately you can decide which times work best for your specific community! These will mostly be based on your resident demographics (which are explained in this post), so understanding your residents is the first step toward creating an effective social media campaign.
Facebook is most effective from Thursday to Sunday, so we suggest posting twice a day on the weekends, and at least once a day during the week. Facebook is also the most diverse in terms of users’ ages, so we recommend using Facebook if your apartment community for all ages.
B2C (Business to customer) performs better on Twitter during the weekend, so this is when you should tweet! Use hashtags to increase your visibility, and be sure to include your apartment community name as a hashtag. Your residents could even be encouraged to use them!
Pinterest’s biggest days are on Saturdays and Sundays, and the most popular topics on these days are food and travel. We suggest pinning local eateries around your apartment on these days, or suggesting places near your apartment community that folks could travel to/good destinations for people new in town.
Instagram’s best days are Mondays and Thursdays, with much later hours (one of the peak hours being 2am). To avoid stressing yourself out about posting at 2am, simply use the Scheduling feature to schedule posts.
Blogging is an important tool for present and future residents. We suggest splitting your time between apartment tips for residents (decorating tips, style guides, amenities, etc.), and enticing new residents (things to do in your city, updates on your property, reasons to rent an apartment rather than buy a house, etc.). The best time of the week to post a blog is Monday at 11AM. Avoid posting blogs over the weekend, as you’ll get very low engagement.
What type of content you post these days is also important. Funny content tends to do better on Friday, while inspirational does well nearer the beginning of the week. Weekends should be reserved for entertainment posts/things to do/etc. rather than reminders of maintenance and rent reminders.
Topic/category
It will be helpful to divide your posts into topics/categories. For instance, a good category for blog posts might be “Apartment decoration” or “Local events,” etc. Determine how often you’d like to post in each category. We recommend allotting no more than 20% of your social media content toward promotional material, lest your residents feel you’re spamming them.
Post
Here is where you’ll want to include the headline in your post, so it’s all ready to go when it’s time to post. You’ll want your headline to be search engine optimized, so make sure it includes all relevant keywords towards the beginning of the headline. Also, include any hashtags you’re planning on using
Link
Include here any links to pictures, graphics, or backlinks you’re going to use. If you have a graphic designer, be sure to give them the links ahead of time so they can design the post before it goes out.
Apartment communities can benefit from adding links to social media posts by driving visitors to their websites or amenity pages, which provides them the chance to create leads and conversions.
Status
Post the status of your social media campaign. Put this box in Green if it’s posted, Yellow if it’s delayed, and Red if it did not get posted.
Step 3: Tips for successful social media campaigns
Consistency
No matter how many times you post (we recommend at least 1-2 times a day on at least one social media platform), make sure to be consistent about it! Your followers will come to expect as many posts from you as is your average. If you set a goal to post 3 blog posts a week, make sure to stick to it! Your residents will appreciate the study stream of information from their property managers.
Quality content
That said, be sure to make sure that the content you are posting is quality content. Residents want to feel like you understand where they’re coming from, and desire to give them more information. This is our credo with quality content: aim to educate, not to sell. If you provide quality content, the leads will come in naturally!
Audience Awareness
Perhaps the best tool at your disposal is your resident demographics persona. Build a basic persona of who your average resident is. Are they in their 20s? Are they a student? A working professional? Do they have a family? Understanding your average resident will help you in your social media campaign because you’ll know better what content they want, and what time to post it.
Measure Metrics
Besides including metrics in the spreadsheet, most social media channels will allow you (as a business profile, rather than a personal profile) to measure the number of clicks, views, impressions, etc. that you are getting from your posts. Monitor these closely so you can tell which content is doing well, and when. Make note of this data in your spreadsheet.
Social media campaigns for apartments can be overwhelming and daunting. If you’re feeling overwhelmed about content creation, posting regularly, or anything digital-marketing related, contact marketapts! We’d love to set you up with a FREE demo of our social media services.
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Categorised in: Apartment Marketing, Social Media
This post was written by Market Apartments
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