Ways to Get Your Residents Involved with Your Community on Social Media
It can be a frustrating battle trying to get your residents involved with your community on social media, and it all starts with getting them to care. You can sit and stare at the number of followers, and some weeks it just won’t go up no matter what you seem to try. The good news is that where there’s a will there’s a way. You’ve put this much effort in to create a great social media page that’s engaging, hyperlocal, and full of your community’s activities, and now it’s time to get your residents in on the fun.
Welcome Cards
If your community offers a welcome bag or welcome packet of informative material, this is a perfect opportunity to throw in some information about your social media. Moving into a new community can be overwhelming, and residents are likely to forget anything mentioned about social media. If you toss a welcome card in the packet that lists all of your social accounts, they’ll be able to reference it at a later date when they’re not as preoccupied with the move-in. Additional bonus for social welcome cards: you can customize them to match your community’s theme and brand.
Signs and Decals
Similar to offering welcome cards, you can transfer the same information and branding to signs that you can hang throughout your community in high foot traffic areas, such as in elevators, stairwells, outside of doors and in communal areas. A cool feature you can add to these signs is a QR Code – bar codes most smartphones can scan – that will take you right to the social pages that you assign to it. Once you’ve set up your QR Code–and put it on a sign or flyer–a resident can scan it and be taken directly to your Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus page. From there, they can get their follow on!
Email Signatures
An email signature that utilizes hyperlinks below your name is a simple and effective way to communicate that your community is on social media. Anytime you send out an email to your residents (and prospects), they’ll be presented with the opportunity to follow your social pages with a simple click. You can head into your email settings and add it to your signature, but make sure you hyperlink it with copy stating which social account it is. There’s no need to clutter your signature by putting the actual link to their social pages. That’s a no-no. The above example shows the best way to present your social links in a clear and concise way.
Fun and Friendly
In the midst of trying to gain followers and grow your social media, it’s important to not lose sight that social media is supposed to be fun! If you keep your social pages filled with enjoyable and relevant information, residents are going to want to follow and keep up with what’s happening at the community. Storytelling strategies like resident features, meet the team, or a pet of the week help gain engagement with current residents as they connect with the content you’re posting. This humanizes the presence, and your audience is more likely to engage when they see fellow residents or staff that they recognize.
We’re here to make sure you know that it is not a lost cause getting residents to join in on social fun. Remember to make your social pages easily available and keep them chock full of value for your audience. If residents are continuously exposed with the opportunity to follow you online, they’ll eventually head over there to see what to expect. Once they see the greatness that is your social media strategy, they won’t be able to pass up the chance to give you a follow.
What are some ways you get your residents to engage with your social pages? We’d love to hear in the comments below! Or hit us up on Twitter at @GoToMyApartment.