Social Media Shifts Will Change the Way Communities Utilize Digital Content to Market Online
Multifamily marketing has undergone a lot of changes in the past year, let alone in the past decade. Today, your next resident isn’t flipping through local newspapers to locate your community – they’re turning to search engines, social media, and other forms of digital content to learn about your property.
The last year witnessed a lot of changes as to how popular social media platforms offer advertising opportunities to the rental housing industry. For starters, Facebook made drastic changes to its advertising policies. These changes included the elimination of certain audience targeting methods, including filters relating to age, gender, and ZIP code.
Stricter guidelines for advertising might make Facebook a trickier landscape for multifamily marketers to navigate – but, in spite of this, social media remains highly regarded by users. Unlike smartphone users, whose numbers have plateaued over recent years, social media continues to see increased use. Over three hundred million people began using social media platforms within the past year – meaning that over 1 million people created new accounts every single day. Not to mention, social media is the most relevant advertising channel for Gen-Z and Millennials.
We will continue to see social media morph into new forms of content, the most popular, is what is known as ephemeral (e-phem-er-al) content. This is short term or temporary content that is accessible on one’s social media feed for a limited time, like Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories, which are changing mainstream social media use.
Temporary content offers a new posting method without having to take up permanent residency on your feed. With 500 million users now posting to Instagram Stories daily, it’s clear to see why Stories are the next frontier for savvy marketers. Over the next year, you can expect to see even more brands utilizing this type of content.
Like Stories, live-streaming has also added excitement to social mediatimelines over the past couple of years. By using Facebook Live and Instagram Live, marketers can continue to capitalize on hot digital marketing trends, including influencer marketing and of course, video content itself. Considering that live videos on Facebook get an average of six times as many interactions as regular videos, it has become a favorite channel for marketers to leverage.
Today’s consumer doesn’t want to feel like just another fish in a sea of customers. They want to belong to something, which is exactly what social media can provide to a digital marketing campaign – a sense of community. In 2020, the way we target our audiences, the type of content we post, and the communities we form online will continue to shift, especially in the multifamily space.
