You spend a lot of time and money trying to attract new tenants. You will always need to attract potential tenants, and you should be sure to direct them to your social media accounts.
Social media significantly affects how people live their lives, buy products, interact with companies, and find their homes. Some landlords even venture into the legal mine field of using social media to screen potential tenants. While this may give these landlords insight into how these possible tenants really live and view their current landlord, it also comes with some potential problems.
Social media is a double-edged sword
Social media is powerful. We have all heard the horror stories associated with people providing too much information about themselves online. Any parent should monitor and limit how much access their young children have to the internet and social media.
As a landlord, your biggest risk of using social media is probably not the information others may see about you. Being inconsistent in how you utilize it to screen tenants and communicate with current occupants is the problem. If a person’s account is public, you are allowed to view it. However, if you use social media as part of the screening process for one tenant, you absolutely must use it to screen all of them.
Using social media to retain renters
According to the Pew Research Center, 62 percent of U.S. adults get news through social media. About 18 percent of those people get their news there often. It is estimated that more than half of online adults use multiple social media sites regularly.
Focus on making your social media account a community where people can get local news and exchange ideas on managing their household. Initiate some worthwhile conversations and consider offering your social media fans deals and gifts that they can’t find anywhere else.
Social media and millennials
Regardless of where your rental properties are located, millennials are an important part of your business. Engaging with them through social media is not required, but it strengthens your connection with them and gives you an advantage over those landlords who do not make the effort to engage these young renters in conversation. That really is what social media is all about.
Millennials want to have a conversation. They are more open with their thoughts and feelings than previous generations, and they want to feel they have influence on what is happening around them. When you use social media to provide them a place to do that, you will find it is easier to fill vacancies and retain current tenants.
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