Social media can have a lasting effect on your self storage facility, both good and bad. Fortunately, there are ways to swing the online pendulum in your favor. In order to keep past, present, and potential storage renters happy to have chosen your facility, there are a few social media practices you want to keep in mind (and others you need to avoid).
Positive Social Media Practices
Quickly Responding to Complaints
Being able to respond to complaints in a timely manner may be easier for some facilities, but not all, and that’s okay. If your social pages ever receive negative remarks, don’t fret. Address the issue as quickly as you can and find a way to work with the tenant to resolve it.
Offer to speak with them privately—either online, over the phone, or at your facility—to prevent any further issues. Working with them in a reasonable time frame can often give them a better feeling toward the facility and help to retain them as a customer in the long run.
Staying on Topic
Remember to stay on the topic of self storage. Social media is fast-paced, which means the conversation is always changing. But as a storage facility, focus on storage. You may not always be aware of what your tenants think about current events or news, and entering into the conversation unknowingly could quickly turn ugly.
Running Social Media Deals
Creating a social media deal for your storage facility can have two benefits. First, it provides those who currently follow your pages with the chance to be rewarded for doing so. It will show them your appreciation and may prompt them to tell others of this deal, which leads to the second benefit…gaining more followers.
If more people follow you on your social profiles in order to take advantage of online deals, it could potentially lead to an increase in tenants and overall long-lasting customer retention.
Negative Social Media Practices
Automating All of Your Posts
Social media can require some automation, especially for storage facilities. If you don’t have the manpower to have someone posting throughout the day, automating your posts can help keep you active online. But automating everything can create issues.
If you have it set up to send out “Thank You” responses for a follow or a like, or even an automated response when someone asks a question, people may get turned off, as it feels robotic and out-of-date. (To learn more about how automated posts can work against you, check out this article by Adweek.)
Making It Up As You Go
In the early days of social media, there was a need to “make it up on the fly” as storage facilities and other businesses were still learning the best way to go about social marketing. But that time has passed.
Storage facilities around the country have learned the ways of social media marketing and figured out how to get the most interaction between other facilities and customers. By not taking a cue from others and learning the best ways to interact on social media, tenants and other storage industry members could write you off as unwilling to adapt.
Not Recognizing Different Audiences
It’s important to understand that social media is not viewed by a singular audience. With each platform—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.—you’re going to get a different audience, which means different social habits and different lingo.
If you share the same posts across each platform and don’t cater them to the specific platform, you’re not effectively targeting your audience. Take some time to get to know who your audience is for each platform and tailor posts to them.
Social media has become a necessary piece of the digital marketing puzzle. While it may seem like social media can harm your self storage facility, it can just as easily bring in new tenants and solidify a good reputation for your business.
