Having a strong social media presence is no longer as simple as setting up a Facebook page. With more and more platforms popping up and gaining momentum, it’s hard to know which social media tools to invest in to achieve the highest possible engagement with your target audience.
For younger generations, the dominant social media trend is Snapchat, a wildly popular image and video messaging app that shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon. With 45 percent of its 300 million users falling into the 18-24 age bracket and 78 percent of those users logging into Snapchat daily, it’s the perfect niche marketing tool for the student housing demographic.
But how can your property properly utilize Snapchat to appeal to the student demographic? The short answer is a familiar one: personal, engaging content. Keep in mind that Snapchat isn’t as complicated or confusing as you might think. The app gets a bad rap as a cryptic enigma for anyone over the age of 25, but in reality, Snapchat offers an intuitive design and simple premise. Once you grasp the basics, your apartment community can start yielding immediate results. Here’s a few proven Snapchat strategies that will boost your brand in the student housing market.
Create Exclusive Tours with My Story
No matter their age, every potential renter wants to get an up-close look at your community’s interior. Pictures can go a long way in marketing your property, but for the modern student demographic, a few photos won’t cut it. The younger generation has crowned video content as their king; therefore, video content can no longer be viewed as a bonus marketing feature for your apartment community—it’s a necessity for modern prospects.
By using Snapchat’s My Story feature, you can elevate your marketing reach just by shooting a video on your phone. My Story acts as a daily journal for users, allowing them to upload videos and pictures for followers to view. These stories disappear after 24 hours, which incentivizes users to stay connected and up-to-date on each other’s uploads. From a business perspective, My Story is a great tool for sharing exclusive and relevant content such as a video tour through your available apartment floor plans. This gives prospective residents a satisfying first look at your community with fresh, in-the-moment content.
Your videos don’t have to be professional, cinematic shots—the short-lived nature of Snapchat content puts the value on what you capture, much more so than how you capture it. With video tours that allow prospects a more in-depth look at your property, you can easily broaden your marketing reach to renters of the Gen-Z demographic.
Expand Your Reach with Custom Geofilters
Snapchat’s social appeal is all about broadcasting your daily adventures—users update their friends on what they’re doing, who they’re with, and where they are. One of the app’s features that users turn to often is a geofilter, which allows users to exhibit their location with a geotag.
A geofilter is a graphic that nearly anyone can create! Snapchat allows you to load the designed image into their platform for users to overlay with the pictures and videos they post. If creating your own graphic sounds like a hassle, Snapchat offers easy-to-use templates and on-demand geofilters that allow you to plug in your property’s name, add a geotag, and hit the ground running.
These ingenious tools are affordable, site-specific, and can boost your marketing reach exponentially. By using a geotag that is specific to your property, you can customize your geofilter so that users can use it while they are at or within close proximity of your community. Offering a geofilter encourages residents to share as well, granting your apartment community a larger audience at no additional cost to you.
Encourage Your Community to Create a Collaborative Story
One of the best ways to use Snapchat is also the easiest—create a Shared Story for your apartment community. Similar the My Story feature, a Shared Story allows you to create a collection of uploaded content, but with the added ability for multiple users to upload pictures and videos to the collection.
A Shared Story pumps your brand full of personality and will make you seem more approachable to interested prospects. Encouraging residents to add snaps and videos creates a real sense of community, too. Whether they’re hosting a party in their spacious entertainment area, playing with Fido in your community Bark Park, or lounging poolside, your residents will showcase the lifestyle of your community to potential renters. By creating a Shared Story for resident content contributions, your residents take care of the marketing for you.
Even though the multifamily housing industry has been slow to adopt new technologies such as Snapchat, your community doesn’t have to follow suit. By utilizing this popular social media platform, you can directly engage with the student rental demographic and stay ahead of the curve in an increasingly competitive rental market. Putting these simple and cost-effective strategies into practice can make your property more appealing, relevant, and inviting for young renters, allowing you to ultimately generate and capture new leads at an impressive rate.