Advertising your listings and your rental business online can be a must to find success as a landlord or property manager. Social media is just one of the many ways to get your message out there and connect with your renters, potential applicants, and owners alike. Whether you’re new to creating a social media strategy for your rentals or you want to streamline the process, there are some key tips that will help.
There are advantages and disadvantages to each social media platform, and understanding where your target renters are digitally visiting can help you a lot in identifying where, how, and when to post. Before you begin signing up for each platform, take a look at your branding goals and expectations. If you haven’t stopped to identify your ideal tenant demographic, now is the time to do so. Social media marketing and having an online presence without having a clear idea of your rental business’s brand won’t get you the results you want.
Think about the most appealing features of the rental properties in your portfolio. What kind of renter will most likely benefit from those features the most? Your ideal tenants will want to work with you because they know the value you and your properties provide.
Keep in mind, that while this can be a helpful thought exercise to get you started, you must always follow Fair Housing guidelines when promoting your properties, vetting tenants, and implementing any practices.
Learn more: Branding Tips for Your Rental Business
Social Media Posting Ideas for Landlords and Property Managers:
Posting on social media is more than just showing off your vacant properties. Social posts provide an opportunity to highlight your rental properties and your business in a way that shows potential tenants what makes your properties special.
Focus on Potential Tenants With Your Posting Strategy:
- Show Current Listings: This is an easy way to get your property vacancies top-of-mind and on the eyes of your ideal tenants. Make sure to include great rental property photos and a short description of your property and its features.
- Highlight Resident Events: If you spend time fostering a great community at your residential properties, be sure to capitalize on that by showing future applicants what they can expect. Highlight the fun by posting photos of your latest event.
- Feature Your Amenities: Your property’s gym, rooftop lounge, or pool can make for great photos and engaging social media posts, all while highlighting the parts of your property that stand out from the competition.
Learn more: What Should Landlords Post on Social Media?
How to Pick the Best Social Media Platforms for Your Business:
As a landlord or property manager, you will want to have an online presence on multiple social media platforms, but without a comprehensive and dedicated social media team you’re not likely to be able to be on all of them. Social media’s algorithm and its community appeal are both directly based on regular interactions – if your rental business has a profile on a specific online platform but doesn’t regularly interact with the community or post there, you’re not likely to see a big ROI from those efforts. Instead of spreading yourself thin across too many platforms, consider a top 2 or 3 to focus on and engage with regularly.
Each platform has its pros and cons, as well as different posting types. Keep in mind the amount of effort that maintaining a profile on a specific platform might entail, and try to focus on the ones that will provide the most bang for your buck and be more likely to find your ideal tenants.
Social Media Platforms Landlords Should Consider:
While there is a nearly infinite amount of social media platforms and online forum options that landlords and management companies can consider using, these platforms may offer a big bang for your buck. Keep in mind that this list is not extensive, and sometimes the best way to find out if a platform is right for your business is to engage for a period of time to see if your audience finds you there.
1. Facebook
- Benefits: There are excellent opportunities to connect with current and potential tenants through private group options and marketing opportunities through the Facebook Marketplace.
- Facebook features options for:
- Marketplace
- Groups
- Pages and Ads
- Facebook features options for:
2. Instagram
- Benefits: Ideal forum for displaying high-end rental portfolios or rental properties with a lot of visual appeal. Landlords can use “stories” and “reels” to showcase property tours and use Highlights to keep important information accessible. Be sure to use relevant hashtags to increase visibility.
- Instagram features include:
- Visual Appealing Photo Dashboard
- Stories and Highlights
- Instagram features include:
7. Reddit
- Benefits: Reddit may not be the first platform landlords or managers consider when seeking marketing opportunities, but its forums provide a unique opportunity to interact with industry leaders and peers.
- Reddit notable features include:
- Subreddits
- AMA (Ask Me Anything), where experts can be interviewed by the community
- Reddit notable features include:
8. TikTok
- Benefits: Strongly favored by the youngest generation of renters, TikTok can provide a great forum to showcase short videos of any upcoming events at your rental properties or show off any rentals currently available on the market. These videos can serve double-duty and be posted as ‘reels’ on Instagram.
- TikTok features include:
- Video Profiles to share information, which can be more engaging than photos.
- TikTok features include:
9. Bonus: YouTube
- Benefits: While not a true social media platform, YouTube’s unique ability to engage and connect with your current and potential tenants shouldn’t be ignored.
- Video Tours: Landlords can create detailed video tours of properties, which can be more engaging than photos.
- SEO: YouTube videos can be optimized for search engines to attract more viewers.
Time-Saving Marketing Hacks for Landlords
Great marketing is pivotal to the success of any business, but good marketing can take a lot of time and energy. This is especially true when you are constantly marketing different types of properties and need to pivot your marketing to highlight various features within your portfolio. A few time-saving hacks and programs can make all the difference, especially for small property management teams or DIY landlords.
Helpful tools for creating posts or posting on social media
Our team at Rentec Direct loves using software to save time while ensuring everything we produce has a human touch. The tools below are ones that our team has used in the past or currently still utilize.
- Buffer: Buffer is a social media management software made to help you schedule and keep track of your social media calendar. Keep in mind that some social media sites do not allow scheduling posts, so be sure to understand the limitations of a scheduling tool before signing up.
- In office, I use Buffer to schedule similar posts across social media platforms. For example, an interesting new blog post can be shared on LinkedIn, Twitter/X, and Facebook at once, which saves a lot of time.
- Canva: Canva is a free-to-use online graphic design tool. You can use it to create social media posts, presentations, posters, videos, logos, and more. It is free-to-use, but advanced features and some templates or graphics are only available with a subscription.
- While big graphic design projects may be best suited for other programs, I use Canva to design quick image cards on videos, Instagram infographics, and more. Our team has used Canva for years, and before Canva became more robust, I spent a lot of time using Adobe InDesign or Photshop. As Canva has evolved, it’s where I do most of my daily design work. It’s far quicker than a traditional design software, and is significantly more user-friendly for beginners who aren’t familiar with traditional and complex publishing software options.
- AI Rental Listing Generator: If you use Rentec Direct for your property management software needs, you have access to an AI listing generator that will create compelling property descriptions for your rentals, instantly. These are perfect to use on any listing site, but also make great descriptions on social media marketing posts.
- Our whole team has had a chance to utilize the AI listing generator within the Rentec Direct software, and we all can agree that it offers huge time-savings! If you’re not a natural writer or marketer, the listing generator takes care of the guess work and creates an engaging ad description of your property. Even for me, with decades of experience as a writer and marketer in the rental industry, the listing generator is significantly faster. Plus, it offers the adjust anything I want to quickly tweak to add a bit of a human touch.
Learn more: New Feature: Instant Property Descriptions for Rental Listings
Final Thoughts:
Sharing and marketing your rental business on social platforms can feel overwhelming if you’re just getting started, but there is no shame in taking it slow and ramping up as you feel more confident about your message, types of posts and the best places to share to reach your respective owners and renters. Using a few helpful tech tools can make all the difference when trying to stay consistent with your posting schedule and ensuring you are interacting with your community to expand your reach.