As you may know, over the last several years, Instagram has grown exponentially as a platform. But did you know that property managers can (and should) take advantage of this to increase their audience and grow their business?
Instagram can be an excellent tool for property managers to win more leads and build stronger relationships with their clients.
But what’s the best way to do this? Like most marketing tools, using Instagram requires some strategy and hard work. While this may seem daunting, once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to increase your social media audience and clientele in no time.
Instagram can help you stand out from your competitors, find tenants for vacant properties, and find landlords who need someone to manage their rental property.
In this article, we’ll go over everything you need to know about optimizing your Instagram profile to help your business succeed.
Keep reading to find out the best ways to use your Instagram!
The Benefits of Instagram for Property Managers
You may be wondering, what exactly are the benefits of using Instagram for my property management company? While using Instagram as a powerful marketing tool may seem time-consuming and overwhelming, it is a cost-effective and useful addition to any marketing strategy, and it may be easier than you think.
According to Statista, over half of the world’s total population uses social media in some way. This means that any business, in any industry, can find new clients on these platforms if they are used correctly. This is especially true of Instagram!
Here are three benefits of using Instagram as a property manager:
1. Easily Engage with Tenants
Maintaining an active presence on social media allows you to connect with your residents so you can foster a community in which your tenants feel welcomed and heard. This will encourage tenants to stay long-term and lower your turnover rates, as a happy tenant often leads to a renewed lease!
2. Connect with Prospective Tenants
A prospective tenant who is interested in your property will always want more information about the home. It’s extremely effective to use social media to share photos of the property, reviews, and any other relevant information about the rental unit.
By maintaining a strong social media presence, you can often generate more interest from prospective tenants, leading to a shorter vacancy period.
3. Strengthen Your Brand
When it comes to building a strong brand identity, you will need more than just a logo and a color scheme! Branding can make a big difference when it comes to attracting new tenants and keeping current residents long-term.
Generally, people are more inclined to do business with companies they feel a strong connection with.
By using social media intentionally and strategically, you can highlight what makes your property management company stand out from the rest. After all, there are many property management companies out there, so this is a great way to highlight what makes yours unique.
Now that you know just how beneficial Instagram can be to a property management company of any size, you may be wondering where to start!
So, let’s talk about our top tips when it comes to building your brand on the platform.
Know What Your Target Audience Wants
The first step in optimizing your property management company’s Instagram profile is to understand what your target demographic is interested in. This is a critical aspect when it comes to growing your social media presence.
Consider a few different aspects of your target audience, including the following:
- What is your target demographic’s age? Are most of your residents millennials, gen z, or gen x? This can largely inform the kind of content you create.
- Consider the location of the rental properties that you manage. Are they in the city? The suburbs? Are they near a college or university?
- What is their lifestyle? Does your target demographic often work from home? Do they live with family or are they students?
By narrowing down what your target demographic will be, you can share content that specifically caters to them.
In addition to understanding your target demographic, try following the accounts of your competitors to see what works for them and get inspiration for future content.
While it is not a good idea to directly copy your competitors, it can be helpful to notice what they are doing to gain their following and engage with their audience.
A little research can go a long way! See what’s working for other brands in your industry, and see what you can add to the market that they don’t offer yet.
Create Reels to Add Value
Instagram reels are one of the best ways to add some extra creativity to your property management company’s page and get more eyes on your content. In fact, according to Instagram, reels are the best way to grow your business and show off your creativity to new audiences.
But what exactly are they, and how can they help grow your audience?
Instagram reels are vertical, full-screen short-form videos that can be as long as 90 seconds. In the app, you can use editing tools and an extensive bank of trending audio to make unique content that is shown to more people than ever before.
Reels appear in both the users’ main feed and in a separate tab designated specifically for reels. They are a great way to show what makes your company unique! Additionally, reels are favored in the Instagram algorithm, so they are often the best method when it comes to engaging with new audiences.
When you are creating reels, be personable and show off your unique expertise and insight. Give helpful tips and tricks to your audience and avoid sounding like a sales pitch. Tell stories, highlight a property, or provide interesting insight based on your own experience in property management!
The best way to make a reel that engages with your audience is to show off your personality while providing information that they want to know. Be sure to edit your reels using fonts, colors, and copy that is consistent with you and your brand.
Maintaining a steady stream of high-quality video content is currently the best way to grow your presence on Instagram!
Use Instagram Stories to Your Advantage
Instagram stories are an excellent way to give your audience a steady stream of content and additional information without clogging their feed. Instagram stories are photos or videos that you can share quickly but they go away after 24 hours.
They also don’t show up on your followers’ main feed, so you won’t run the risk of posting too much. A healthy amount of stories to post is about two per day.
Stories are a great place to answer frequently asked questions from followers, as well as ask your own audience questions that allow you to get to know them better. They are an opportunity to start a steady conversation with your followers.
Ask your followers what problems they currently face when it comes to rental properties and what kind of content would help them the most. This will give you valuable insight when it comes to creating content that your followers will engage with and find interesting in the future.
Try telling them an informative and relatable story about your time in the industry. Instagram stories are an excellent opportunity to try out new content with your audience and they can help you gauge their interest in different topics.
Additionally, Instagram stories have many different features that can help you further your conversation with your audience. For example, using a question sticker allows your followers to ask you questions directly, and you can share your answer in a separate story.
Or, you can use the poll sticker to ask questions to your audience. This can help start conversations and provide new content regularly.
Post Consistently and at the Right Times
One way to grow your Instagram presence and engage with your audience is to post at strategic times when user activity is at its peak. In fact, your Instagram page will likely suffer if you don’t implement a strategy when it comes to posting your content.
Audience engagement with your content is more likely to happen when you post at strategic times. After all, if your audience isn’t online when you’re posting, they won’t be able to see what you have posted!
The best way to do this is to make sure your profile is set up as a business profile on Instagram. This will enable you to keep a close eye on your business analytics, allowing you to know when your audience is most active on Instagram, and when they will be most likely to see your posts.
If you specifically post at peak times when your audience is at their most active, it will increase your chances of being boosted in the algorithm and reaching new accounts within your niche.
As for the frequency of your posts, consistency is key! A good amount of content to post is generally a couple of main feed posts per week and two or three stories per day.
This will keep your audience engaged with your content without overwhelming their feeds or annoying them. However, regardless of how much you plan on posting content, do your best to be as consistent as possible.
Use a Content Scheduler
As we mentioned above, consistency is key when it comes to growing your business’s Instagram account. A great way to maintain consistency in your posting is to use a content scheduler!
Sticking to a specific post schedule can help to build a reliable and consistent experience for those who are following your account. This will keep them updated on your company.
While you can always do this yourself, using scheduling tools like Later, Loomly, Hootsuite, or Tailwind to build your content posting plan in advance is a great way to keep it consistent.
A content scheduler makes managing your Instagram easier by allowing you to schedule your posts in advance at specific times across a variety of social media platforms.
Before creating your content schedule, carefully review your business profile’s analytics to determine the best time to make your posts. As we mentioned above, posting at the wrong times can ultimately hurt your engagement.
Write High-Quality Captions
To help increase your engagement, you should write captivating captions for each post. If you are unsure of what makes an excellent caption, examine your competitors’ captions and see what works for them.
Additionally, you can experiment with many different caption styles to see what your audience responds well to.
When crafting your captions, keep them short, to the point, and engaging. Try your best to keep it below 150 characters. With strategic use of things like emojis, keywords, and hashtags, you can use captions to not only engage with your own audience but also reach new ones.
Ultimately, a well-crafted caption for an Instagram post can achieve two things to help you grow your account:
- Increase your chances of being favored by the algorithm by making your content interesting and engaging for new followers (this can be done with keywords and hashtags).
- Connect with the audience you already have, making it easier to retain your followers and keep their attention.
Optimize Your Business Profile
The most important part of your Instagram profile is to make sure that every aspect of your page, including your handle and bio, is relevant and clear. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for potential clients to find you and your business.
Whether it’s someone who is coming across your business for the first time or someone who is actively searching for your profile, you want to make sure your business is easy to find and identify by users.
Make sure to create a strong bio that gives new clients a good sense of who you are as a company and what you have to offer. You should also include keywords to help your page get found by even more people.
This will also help boost your profile by sending important ranking signals to the algorithm on Instagram. Always make sure that your website is included in your bio, and that your account is a business profile.
Lastly, be sure to include any locations that you serve and your contact information. Your Instagram bio should include everything that a new client would need to get in touch with you and learn more about your property management company.
When building your profile, your goal should be to turn followers into clients.
Use Hashtags
Hashtags are one of the easiest ways to grow your audience and expand the number of accounts that your content is reaching. This is the key to success when it comes to growing your brand identity on Instagram.
A hashtag is a keyword or topic that you include in your post’s caption with a # symbol in front of it. Users can then click on the hashtag to find more posts in that niche, or they can even follow the hashtag to see a specific topic in their feeds more often.
The main purpose of a hashtag is to increase the visibility of your post.
By using the right hashtags, you can attract new followers to your business profile in three main ways:
- Your content may show up on a hashtag page. This means that even people who don’t follow you will end up seeing your post, as it will appear to anyone who clicks on the hashtag.
- Hashtags can increase the chances of your post appearing in search results on Instagram.
- People may also choose to follow hashtags that are relevant to their interests. This means that your post could show up on the main feed of anyone who is interested in the type of content that you are producing. This will happen even if they don’t follow your account yet!
For posts on your main feed, it is best to add around three to five hashtags. You want to choose hashtags that describe your company, what you do, and what service you can offer to people who are looking for your specific niche.
Additionally, while you may think that the most popular hashtags would be the best ones to use, it is actually a better strategy to use highly targeted and specific hashtags. This means that you will have less competition and a better chance of getting your posts seen by people who are interested in your specific niche.
It is also important to note that in order to use hashtags to boost your Instagram SEO, they will need to be located in the caption of your post rather than the comment section.
Here are some hashtag ideas that a property management company could use in their posts:
- #fallriverpropertymanagement
- #landlordhacks
- #propertyinvesting
Include things like your location or the topic you are speaking about in your hashtag.
Be Present in Your Niche
One feature of Instagram that can be highly beneficial to any business owner is the “other people they follow” section. You can use this to follow and engage with other accounts in your niche.
This will both help you gain community on the app with other people who are interested in your niche and it will signal to Instagram’s algorithm that you are a part of that niche. This will allow the Instagram algorithm to show your content to more people who will actually engage in your content.
Try your best to focus on intentional engagement with other accounts that have their own following and are within your niche. If your profile catches their attention and they end up following you back, then the Instagram algorithm will recommend your profile to people who follow them as well.
As a property manager, try engaging with a variety of accounts in your industry, such as home designers, vendors in your area, cleaning/home hacks, fellow property managers, real estate agents, landlords, and investment property accounts in your area.
Engage With Your Audience
While the above methods are great for attracting the attention of more followers, you must put in the time to retain your following as well! Do your best to respond to as many comments on your posts as possible. This will both improve your relationship with your followers and increase the likelihood of more people commenting on your post.
Additionally, the more comments appear on your post, the better chance you have of being seen in the algorithm. A simple response to a comment could earn you a new high-value, long-term client!
As mentioned above, make conversation with your followers. Ask them questions, be kind, and listen to them and their needs. Include calls to action and provide incentives to engage with your content. For example, offer your followers a one to two-page guide with advice for new landlords.
Be Authentic
One of the biggest things that you will want to avoid with your content on Instagram is to come across as too sales-like or ingenuine. People on Instagram are often looking for businesses that provide authentic content that is interesting and helpful, instead of constantly consuming ads.
Your clients will instantly be able to tell if you don’t care about them or aren’t being honest with them.
When creating content for your Instagram page, be sure to show off your passion and energy for what you do! Get creative, be original, and stay true to your brand and your values. Including your own unique personality in your content is the best way to increase engagement with your followers and reach new audiences.
In fact, Instagram’s algorithm specifically highlights original content when showing your content to new users. This means that content that you created or have not posted on the platform before will gain a larger audience on the platform.
Bottom Line
Ultimately, Instagram is an excellent and cost-effective marketing tool that can take your property management company to new levels of success. However, it must be used correctly!
Take the time to engage with other accounts, including your followers and other accounts in your niche. This will help build an online community and get your property management company in front of new eyes.
Create content that is high quality and interesting to your audience, and always remain original and authentic. Additionally, by using newer features on Instagram such as stories and reels, you can expand your following and reach.
