Traversing Social Media Marketing

[Eric Brown]

The way people purchase things today is changing before our eyes. Over the last three years Urbane Apartments has ceased traditional marketing efforts in exchange for a myspace site, a facebook site, YouTube and flickr sites and maximum exposure on our local Craigslist. We also use twitter regularly. We recently started a Social Network site on Ning.com, the Urbane Lobby . Like many other Social Network sites we have run into some snags, stalled membership, and lack of participation. We have regrouped and made directional corrections and believe we have an effective revised plan to give our residents enough reason and enough value to make regular visits, beyond just paying rent on line and placing a service request on line. Our Goal; To provide our residents with an experience and value with a high enough return to create enough Customer Evangelists within our core resident base that they self rent our apartments. We are working hard to lead our resident Influencers within our core resident base, and have transitioned most of our marketing budget inward, to further focus on our existing residents. Only good things have happened from this move. Resident retention has significantly improved, and we have created a forum and a field for the Influencers to participate. Along the path we hope to become Social Media experts based on our experience as to what works for multifamily and what doesn’t. We are learning as we go, but are seeing stellar results.

Any feedback, input, good or bad comments are much welcome as we traverse the path and figure out how to navigate the waters of Social media