Tweet Your Neighbors: Leveraging Twitter in Your Local Community
Ongoing conversations with local businesses! Increased exposure to potential residents of your multifamily community! Good buzz that you don’t have to pay (or do much work) for! How can you get this to happen?
When it comes to your local community, Twitter is the place to be. Perhaps you’re familiar with the behemoth social network, yet you’ve wondered how you can take your property to the “next level” when it comes to leveraging this popular tool to establish your apartment’s brand as a valuable part of the community. As of the end of 2014, Twitter has nearly 300 million active users and it turns out that your apartment community is one of them. How can you tap into some of that potential? It’s simple: Think locally. If you want customers, clients, or residents to come to where you are, then the first step is establishing your brand among a place where they will want to be. Here, we’re going to review a few key things you can be doing on Twitter to establish yourself in your local community.
Follow the Leaders
Engaging in your community starts with the easy steps. First, take stock of the town, city, or neighborhood in which you’re located, and make a list of the local businesses, big and small. Find their profiles on Twitter, follow them all, and stay updated with what they’re tweeting about. Following the leaders and influencers in the community may not make much of a difference in their Twitter followings, but it will make all the difference in the world when it comes to you staying informed of local events.
Strike Up a Conversation
Initiating conversations and engagement is one of the best things you can do to make yourself known to local business and potential customers. This is extremely important! Tweet at a business, then possibly retweet a response they give you if appropriate to do so. And if you tweet something useful or valuable to a community leader, the exposure of a retweet from them can work wonders when it comes to simply getting your brand out there for people to see. When striking up conversations—and replying—it’s best to keep in mind that your goal is to serve the community around you, whether you’re serving them useful information about a local restaurant or helpful hours of a community business. And don’t worry: when you’re persistent, you will get noticed!
Picture This
Using pictures in your Twitter strategy is important, as you can craft specifically how you want your brand to be seen. Spotlight a delicious-looking plate from the restaurant around the corner, show that adorable puppy at the pet center down the road, and snap a pic of that sunset that can be viewed the next block over. Tweeting images that make life look appealing can go a long way in showcasing your community and establishing yourself amongst others in the community.
Get a Handle on the Community
When it comes to Twitter, it’s important to know your audience. Many Twitter users have feeds that are clogged with countless businesses, celebrities, news outlets, and friends vying for their attention, and the potential for the network’s growth in users by the millions is staggering! All this to say: it’s important to stand out. If there’s a popular hashtag for your community, use it! Geo-tag posts that come from your property. And use the Twitter search function to find who may be talking about what’s going on in your neighborhood. If you’re tweeting something completely irrelevant to your audience—that is, content that doesn’t pertain at all to your brand or life in your community—then you’re just going to get lost in the shuffle. It’s all about providing value to the conversations.
A Very Long Engagement
Keeping an established relationship going is important to your Twitter strategy, as well as to your social networking strategy as a whole. Engagement produces followers, and followers grow your brand. Stay consistent in reaching out to local people and businesses, comment and compliment in relevant conversations when necessary, and soon enough you’ll find yourself a leader whom others reach out to. As you keep engagement going—and work at building relationships—you’ll find other users serving you by passing business your way.
When it comes to Twitter, there are many ways to leverage and utilize this particular network to “hit it out of the park” with your branding. With a social media strategy that includes thinking locally, the right methods when it comes to engaging in your community, and a mindset that’s dedicated to serving those people and businesses in the community around you, you’ll be a local superstar in no time!
Your Turn
Are you using Twitter to engage with your local community? What are your strategies and are they successful? Let me know in the comments below or hit me up on Twitter at @GoToMyApartment. Thanks for reading!