Why Social Media is a Must for Marketing Your Rental Properties and How to Make the Best of it
Social Media is just for fun right? Wrong. Social media is a powerful business strategy that you should be using, regardless of the nature of your business.
But let’ say for the sake of this particular article that your business is cash flow real estate investment. You’ve got a number of rental properties that you need to keep full. Naturally, you take out an ad in Craig’s List, maybe the local paper or penny saver and perhaps list your properties or rental units with a local agent. However, it never occurs to you that you could, and should, utilize Social Media to market your rental properties.
So how do you do it? How do you take Facebook beyond connecting with old friends from high school, and twitter from the occasional, “oh, this is a great article! I think I’ll tweet it” to a useful marketing strategy? Here are a few tips to get social media – a free marketing vehicle by the way- working for you and your real estate investment business:
Getting Started:
- Set up a Gmail account that is just for your social media marketing. Let’s say that your company is called ABC Real Estate. Set up, for example, abcresocial at gmail dot com. Why Gmail? Because, lets face it, Google is everywhere, and in everything, and many social media channels are already connected to or owned by Google such as YouTube, Google +, Waze and Picasa to name a few.
- Utilize your gmail account to set up all of your social media business pages. Do not set them up from your personal email or social media page. Set up a Facebook Page, Google + page ( you will have to use your name to set up the account and then set up a separate business page with your business name; this is confusing to many), YouTube Channel, Picasa account, Twitter and Waze to start.
- Facebook. Facebook is a terrific mode for announcing your rental properties. On Facebook you can place images of the property, link to videos of it from YouTube and leave a nice long announcement about availability and rental pricing. Most importantly, however, is that you can ASK PEOPLE TO SHARE your message on their own pages, as well as utilize paid Facebook strategies and ads to get more visibility for your posts and advertisements.
- Google +: Similar to Facebook, you can place images, videos and information about your rental properties and ask people to +1 them and share on their own Google + pages. In addition to that, Google + is terrific for SEO and driving traffic back to your company website.
- Twitter. Yes! You can tweet about that terrific, spacious loft you’ve got available for rent in the perfect location downtown. Or whatever. Twitter is more for the immediate, but by using hashtags and asking for retweets you can get your announcement out there.In addition to that you can interact with potential renters by searching key words like housingrentals, apartmenthunt, or rentals.
- Youtube. There is nothing like a great video to give potential renters a good idea of how terrific your rental property is and what the neighborhood looks like. Also, YouTube is owned by Google so you can utilize SEO tactics to optimize your video properties and get your video found when potential renters are doing searches online for rentals in your area.
- Picasa. For simple photo editing, tagging and geotagging, Picasa is a great cloud storage space for all of your rental property and neighborhood images and its simple interface for social sharing with Google + and more make it the perfect choice for your still media needs.
- Waze. Yup, Google recently bought the terrific new Israeli mapping application that everyone is nuts about. So why set up an account with Waze? You can easily share direction links on all of your social media channels as well as text them to potential renters who need to come take a look at your property. In addition to being a very handy application (no matter where you are) Waze has a terrific culture of user engagement, thus placing it in the arena of social media.
