Of the top five most popular social media apps, Snapchat is the most cryptic to navigate and has the shortest content lifespan. Those are two reasons why young adults love Snapchat, and your student housing community can benefit from loving it, too. So Snapchat…Who Cares? Snapchat doesn’t offer traditional menus for navigation. It’s all about exploration and being in-the-know. The small nuggets of content posted by users can disappear in a fewer than 24 hours. If your student housing brand uses Snapchat, you’re demonstrating that you are relevant, timely, and engaging. Your prowess can place you in front of the eyes of more than 130 million students. About 77 percent of college students use Snapchat and they use it often. Nearly 80 percent of users log in into Snapchat daily. On average, they send 34 snaps each day. With your content in the midst of the action, you can make major impressions. How to Use Snapchat for Student Housing The content in Snapchat has a very short lifespan. As such, your posted content may have a quick expiration date. Use snaps to explore limited-time offers at your property. Maybe you take Snapchatters on a tour of an available unit. Perhaps you use the platform to market a move-in promotion. Snapchat provides an opportunity to highlight content with a short shelf life. Snaps are also great for “setting the scene,” depicting what it’s like to live in your neighborhood. Create short videos and pictures of daily life in the community. Excerpts of a resident pool party show the potential for fun and new friends. Residents enjoying sunset on the rooftop deck show to opportunities to relax amidst a hectic class schedule. Take residents behind the scenes of your community through Snaps. Such snaps can be an interesting way to showcase updates at the community that benefit residents. Think of big ticket items like pool deck upgrades as well as small things like seasonal flower installations. Spice it up with a quick Q&A with the crew. Residents may like getting to know people they may see in their community. Community events are perfect Snapchat fodder, especially when you have high attendance. Take advantage of the “crowd surf” feature, which stitches together multiple snaps recorded by users to create one continuous video at events. Let Users Find You Unlike a Facebook business page, your Snapchat profile provides minimal information about your student housing community. In order for prospects to find you, be sure to use geofilters on some of your posts. This creates a way for viewers to identify your location. When residents see your geofilter, they may be encouraged to use it as well. Geotags quickly and easily broaden your marketing reach. Learn more about smart managing and marketing of your community with the Yardi Student Housing...
Snap Happy
Property Marketing Goes Guerrilla
OMG’s, LOLZ’s, puppy-dog faces and flower crowns. Snapchat is sometimes reduced to these simple stereotypes and thought of as something to entertain the kids when the adults get tired of the noise at family dinners. But noise and chaos are staples of modern life, for company and consumer alike. And as the godfather of guerilla tactics, Sun Tzu, expounded upon millennia ago, “In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.” When fully leveraged, Snapchat can be used to cut through the chaotic noise, both at family gatherings and in today’s rental marketplaces, to turn potential opportunity into new prospects. Background All social media platforms once represented an unconventional and unrealized marketing space. This is no longer the case. Snapchat is one of the many recent social frontiers that qualifies as a guerilla marketing opportunity for brands. It’s a place where you can outmaneuver your competition through unconventional and creative means (without a huge budget), thereby gaining greater exposure and winning. Some continue to dismiss Snapchat as “just an app.” At one point, the doubters may have been correct, but as the scope of Snapchat’s business has expanded so has their reach. It’s now a social media platform that competes closely with the companies typically identified as giants in the space. Case Study So you want proof, eh? The intrepid property managers at Continental Realty Corporation (CRC) just so happen to be early Snapchat adopters, and they were kind enough to share the data of some recent campaigns with us. In October 2016, CRC ran two Snapchat filter campaigns for onsite events, one in the commercial space and one in the residential space. At the commercial property, CRC ran a custom filter for the “Jerry Adams Chili Cookoff.” The Snapchat filter campaign lasted for...
Snapchat Scoop
For multifamily marketing
It’s possible you’re not using Snapchat yet for your apartment marketing. Or at all. And, I don’t blame you on that one. It’s hard enough monitoring your community Facebook page. And Twitter account. And maybe you even set up an Instagram account. What about Pinterest? Phew. That’s a lot of social media! Why incorporate another platform? Especially one that, when launched, sounded like it would just be used for teens to bully each other or something. I mean, disappearing pictures and videos? It totally sounds like the social media version of putting a flaming bag of poop on someone’s doorstep, ringing the bell and then running away. Attention grabbing, but ultimately an annoyance where the work doesn’t equal the reward. But, think again. Snapchat is huge right now. (Here’s a tutorial if you’re not familiar.) There are currently millions of users who use it daily. And most of its users are in the 34 years and younger group. Hey, a lot of renters are in that age group! Don’t you want their sweet, sweet eyeballs on your marketing efforts? Sure, maybe the app is just a flash in the pan. But remember, that’s what a lot of businesses said when Facebook started getting a lot of traction. And then, all of a sudden, everyone and their grandmother had an account, and people thought it was strange if they couldn’t find yours. The apartment industry is notoriously slow adopting to new technology. But why not get out ahead of the curve? And since Snapchat users skew a little younger than some of the other social media platforms, it might be a great place to focus marketing efforts for student housing communities. So, you’ve downloaded the app. What are some good ways to use it for...
