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Your Guide to Making the Most of Instagram
Does your community rely on Instagram as part of your social media strategy? Make sure you’re staying on top of the latest trends and features to keep your channel engaging. Erica Byrum, Apartments.com assistant vice president of social media, shared her top tips at this year’s NAA Apartmentalize conference.
Don’t forget about your bio
Instagram isn’t just about your posts. The front door to your account, your bio section, is an oft-overlooked resource.
“This isn’t anything new, but I do think this is a piece of real estate that’s under-utilized by apartment communities and PMCs,” Byrum said.
She encouraged communities to use this space as a way to reinforce their brands, optimize their accounts for search, and boost engagement.
What must-haves should your bio feature? At the minimum, include your logo, description, and contact information. To boost engagement, work in calls to action, such as driving traffic to website. And to maintain a polished, professional look, remember to apply your brand colors and fonts.
Instagram recently expanded the bio functionality to include multiple links. However, Byrum recommended sticking with the popular link-in-bio tool Linktree, which lets you easily brand your content and consolidate all your external links in a single location.
“You can see how lovely it looks to be on brand,” Byrum said.
Use emojis, hashtags, and metadata
Small details like emojis and tags can go a long way.
Dropping emojis in your posts is a simple way to add personality and increase engagement. In fact, Byrum said, adding emojis to Instagram posts can increase engagement up to 48 percent!
Another classic strategy is the hashtag. When you include hashtags in your posts, it can help you capture a broader audience — or target a more specific group — and perform better in search.
Geotags, which identify your physical location, can make it easier for users to find you. They indicate where your photos or status was posted from, and, as an added perk, they can also help you find crowdsourced content from your own residents.
Byrum also recommended adding in alt text. A brief description of an image, this information is not only helpful when an image fails to load but it has two other advantages. It improves accessibility for visually impaired users who rely on screen readers, and it provides search optimization within the Instagram platform.
Boost engagement with stickers
Instagram Stickers is an interactive feature that you can use to increase engagement with your Instagram story posts.
Byrum pointed to a few different applications for this feature. One quick, fun option is creating a poll, such as highlighting two photos and having users click on stickers to cast their vote.
You can also use stickers to link out to your website, such as spotlighting your amenities or pointing out to a blog post.
Make videos faster
Byrum highlighted a few new features that make it easier to create engaging videos.
For example, the green screen filter — which lets you swap out your background with selected graphics or video — is now much more accessible. This is a great way to create a polished-looking property tour recorded right from your desk, with images and clips of your property layered in.
And with the recent template functionality for reels, you can quickly combine clips with trending audio and have Instagram stitch it together for you in seconds. Byrum emphasized that trending audio is an important way to capture attention and increase the visibility of your content.
Surface and repurpose your content
With Instagram Highlights and Guides, you can ensure your audience gets the most out of your content.
Highlights are the stories you select to show on your profile permanently, organized into categories relevant to your brand. You can also brand these links to reflect your community’s look and feel.
And Instagram Guides, while not a new feature, are underutilized in the multifamily space, Byrum said. This feature lets you compile a collection of posts to provide your audience with lifestyle tips, neighborhood recommendations, and more. It can also boost your brand and search engine optimization within Instagram.
Get collaborative
With its collections functionality, Instagram has let users save posts in a private folder for reference. Now this functionality is available across users, so you can share collections with others to build a shared library.
And with Instagram Collabs, you can also create public posts and reels that are shared across two accounts. If you’ve considered partnering with an influencer, you can now get even more most mileage out of your collaboration. With Collabs, a post or reel will populate to both profiles at the same time, with all comments, shares, and likes shared across both accounts.
Discover more tips on social media marketing
Want more tips from Erica? Follow @ApartmentsBiz on Facebook and Twitter for Erica’s social media ideas and best practices, or follow Apartments.com on LinkedIn. Interested in personalized support? Check out Apartments.com’s Social Media & Reputation Suite.
And explore more sessions from Apartmentalize 2023! Now available on demand, these presentations offer market insights, advertising tips, and social media best practices. See all on-demand webinars from this year’s Apartmentology Learning Lounge, or learn more from Erica:
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