Introducing Support for RSS Feeds, Twitter Follow, and Improved Sharing

Over the last few weeks we’ve been rapidly making updates to the TurnSocial bar, so I thought I’d take a quick moment to bring everyone up to date with what we’ve been up to.

RSS

First and foremost, we’ve had lots of requests for us to introduce support for RSS feeds on the TurnSocial bar – so I’m happy to announce that we pushed an update over the past weekend that does just that! TurnSocial customers can now easily add any RSS feed they’d like to a toolbar directly through their admin screen – just one more way to deliver useful content to visitors on every page of your website. Don’t want to use RSS content from your blog? No problem – why not get creative and share your Quora “Answers” feed? We look forward to seeing the myriad of ways our customers use the RSS feature to interact with visitors on their websites, and we’re very happy to finally offer support for this long-desired feature.

Twitter Follow

It’s always been great that visitors to your site can see what you’ve been up to on Twitter, but now with our built in Twitter follow button they can also follow you with just one click! No need to enable this feature – just check your TurnSocial bar, and you’ll see that the update is already live!

Share

Another new tweak to the TurnSocial bar you may notice is an enhanced “Share” button, with a clear call to action next to the “Share” icon. We heard you loud and clear when you told us that you thought many people couldn’t immediately identify the “+” sign as an area of the page to share from, so we’ve taken this as the first of multiple steps to increase sharing engagement. Have more suggestions for how we can improve the toolbar UI? Feel free to shoot me a message at matt at TurnSocial.com and let me know – I’m always up for hearing new ideas.

Between support for RSS, built-in Twitter follow capabilities, a few minor UI tweaks, and our announcement of support for Satisfacts Resident Ratings, the last few weeks have been quite exciting for us at TurnSocial. We have some very cool things we’re working on behind the scenes right now, and I can’t wait to share them with you over the coming months – so why don’t you pop up that little Twitter icon on the TurnSocial bar below and follow us to stay up to date with what we have in store?

Thanks again for all of your continued support – here’s to a great second half of 2011!

Get SatisFacts Resident Ratings On Your Community Website

We’re happy to introduce an exciting new feature for our partners in the multifamily industry – the ability for apartment companies to add SatisFacts Resident Ratings directly to their community website with the TurnSocial bar. A community’s website is an excellent source of inbound leads, and it’s our job to do everything we can to increase your rate of visitor conversion even more. The addition of SatisFacts as a supported app means you now have an additional tool in your arsenal to deliver engaging content for your visitors to connect with.

SatisFacts Resident Ratings

One of our goals at TurnSocial is to expand a community’s ability to market itself beyond simply showing/telling prospects about the property. The TurnSocial bar provides the context of the community’s presence on popular social networks, as well as local information about the surrounding neighborhood. How walkable is the neighborhood? What do current residents have to say about the area? What popular restaurants are nearby? TurnSocial enables access to social media profiles and location-aware content from WalkScore, Rentwiki, Yelp, and more directly onto apartment community websites to help prospective renters learn the answers to these types of questions. And now, with the addition of ratings from SatisFacts annual surveys and Insite™, its 365-day/year feedback program, we’re helping to improve a community’s online reputation and marketing appeal even more.

SatisFacts is the multifamily industry’s leading resident satisfaction survey, retention and performance improvement service provider. Adding resident ratings from SatisFacts provides prospective renters with valuable information from their peers about an apartment community, while creating a powerful way for apartment marketers to enhance online lead generation. Every SatisFacts rating is displayed on a scale of 1-5 stars, and since it’s built into the TurnSocial bar, will appear unobtrusively on every page of your website. Who better than current residents to tell new prospects how great your community is to live in?

When you only have a few critical seconds to make a favorable impression on new visitors to your website, every opportunity to highlight your strong points is meaningful. If you’re not currently a SatisFacts customer and would like to get resident ratings for your community, email me at matt at turnsocial.com and I’ll connect you with the right people – they’ve got plans starting as low as $1/per unit per year!

Take a look at the example rating we’ve added to the bar on the bottom of this page, and let us know what you think in the comments!

The #1 Way To Use Facebook to Market Apartments

How to market apartments on Facebook

Facebook is massive, and getting bigger by the day. There’s no denying its reach among American consumers, and myriads of companies are being funded and built solely on the premise that they’re going to help you become a better marketer while capitalizing on the web of connections built by sites like Facebook. These companies are flooding the market with tools; everything from social media dashboards (which help manage your various campaigns) to automation software (which will plan your updates algorithmically, so that they’re released within the optimal time frame to be seen by the largest potential audience of readers).

So what else can you do to enhance your ability to “pull” residents into your community? To start, you can make it look like an incredibly desirable place for prospective residents to live. And what’s the best way to showcase the people, relationships, and activities that make your community so great to the outside world? That’s right … Facebook.

Facebook As A “Pull” Marketing Strategy

Whether lurking on #AptChat or reading the comments section of some of our favorite #multifamily bloggers, I consistently hear people asking for advice on how they can get better at marketing their community on Facebook. “It’s impossible to measure ROI!” “My PM’s don’t know what they should post!” “We don’t see any leads come through Facebook so why should we waste our time?” I’ve got news for you: you’re doing it wrong. I agree, it’s incredibly hard, if not impossible to measure ROI on Facebook, and knowing what to post and when is something that you can only get better at with practice and time. (ROI isn’t the ultimate measurement of marketing performance, either.)

What I most take issue with is the underlying premise: that Facebook should be treated like any other traditional “push” marketing channel, and held to the same standards when it comes to ROI. It’s not, and it shouldn’t be. The biggest opportunity Facebook presents for your community is the same reason millions of people spend hundreds of hours crafting their perfect public profile: Facebook lets you put your best face forward. It draws people into your world. Facebook is your chance to take what’s best about living in your community and put it on display for the world – it’s dynamic, it’s alive, and it’s the closest someone can come to knowing what it’s like to live in your community without actually sharing your street address, if it’s done right. Which begs the question – what does apartment marketing on Facebook look like done right?

The #1 Way To Use Facebook To Market Apartments

In all likelihood, every other channel you market to relies on a traditional “push” strategy. If you turn off the faucet, the water (or leads) run dry. The reason why many people look at Facebook and see nothing but a heavy time commitment with no measurable ROI is because they expect it to act like any other traditional push tool. It won’t! Can we accept that Facebook may be best used as a means to pull new residents in, simply because they can’t deny the attraction to your vibrant community? In the same way that millions of individuals use Facebook to showcase their best self to the world and draw others into their orbit, so should your community.

Which marketing tactic do you think is going to be more impactful on a potential resident in 2013 — having to choose between one of the 20 text ads they see in a search engine results page, or landing on your community’s Facebook page and seeing the glowing faces of residents who look, talk, act like, and enjoy the same things that they do? Which would have more impact on you?

The Opportunity is Now

Your competition doesn’t get it. In two years, 98% of these same companies still won’t get it. That’s unfortunate for them, but it’s great news for you — it means there’s an unprecedented opportunity for you to stand out in a highly competitive and crowded marketplace. If someone told you how big SEO, PageRank, and search engine results were going to be back in 2004, wouldn’t you have thrown a large portion of your resources into managing your presence on Google? Imagine the benefits you’d be reaping now, 7 years later!

This kind of long term thinking requires discipline, short term investment without measurable ROI, and smart staffing choices, but if executed correctly your company can establish an almost insurmountable lead over your competitors in a few years time. When you reset your expectations of how Facebook works as a marketing channel, your perspective widens to include the new possibilities that a successful pull strategy can offer. Your level of success depends on how willing you are to commit.

We’ll dig a bit deeper into what a successful Facebook “pull” strategy looks like in a future post, but for now I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the topic. How does your company view the Facebook opportunity? Do you have an example of a particular community which shines as a best practice example for the industry? Do you think my interpretation of the market opportunity is totally off-base? Let us know in the comments!!

VaultWare adds support for 3rd party apps; features TurnSocial.

VaultWare, a provider of apartment marketing and leasing solutions, recently announced support for 3rd party apps within their premium website offering, specifically mentioning TurnSocial as an example of how customers can make their website more interactive. We’re honored to be mentioned as the featured app!

VaultWare’s support for services like TurnSocial illustrates the increasing desire of multifamily companies to incorporate social and location-based media into their websites, and further establishes TurnSocial as the go-to product for accomplishing this somewhat complicated task with ease. We’re proud to add VaultWare to our list of partners focused on building value in the multifamily housing industry, and look forward to a great year ahead as we continue to roll out innovative features targeted directly at property management professionals.

To learn more about Vaultware, visit their website by clicking here. If you’re a business owner or agency interested in working with us on a custom solution for your customers, please reach out to me directly to discuss the opportunity at .

Do you let good leads slip through your hands?

Just for a moment, let’s forget about optimizing your website design for conversions and think about how many times you’ve let a good lead slip through your hands simply because you failed to follow up on an inquiry that came through your “contact us” form. What did you really just miss out on? Let’s think about what we know about this person…

  • They want to learn more.
  • They tried to engage you.
  • They told you how to reach them.
  • They want to be your customer!

And to think you let them slip through the cracks because you were too busy to spend 5 minutes typing out a personalized response email. You, my friend, have just had a serious #OPPORTUNITYFAIL.

It’s important to always look for ways to optimize your website for conversions, but if you don’t take the time to follow up on every legitimate inquiry you receive you might as well pack your bags and go home. You can’t complain about a lack of new business if you fail to follow up with someone who has expressed their interest so clearly, and you never know what opportunity lies behind that email address – it’s quite possible that you might have missed out on a game-changing deal that could take your business to the next level.

The next time you consider archiving that inbound email inquiry without responding, do yourself a favor and repeat this mantra: “I will answer every legitimate inquiry my website receives within 24-48 hours, regardless of the day of the week.” The internet doesn’t observe weekends. If you’re serious about building your business online, neither will you.

If you need more inspiration, take a moment and read what my friend Evan Hamilton had to say over on the Uservoice community blog. They aim to answer inquiries in a hour or less – now that’s what I’d call customer service.