If you missed it, you might have some unanswered questions running through your head, like:

1.)    If rating websites restrict me from responding to comments, should I encourage residents to post feedback? (Ben’s quick answer: Yes, but refer residents and prospective residents to sites you can control.)

2.)    Sometimes I feel as though reviews are like zombies attacking our company.  How can we survive? (Ben’s quick answer: Have a solid communication plan in place for your community and hold your ground!)

3.)    I just started a social media campaign.  How can my community get more Facebook Likes and Twitter followers? (Ben’s quick answer: Give your audience relevant, consistent and awesome news to keep them interested.  This helps engagement grow and hopefully the word will spread!)

Ben was able to answer all of these questions in full detail and – lucky for you – the session was recorded!  Apartments.com understands not everyone can attend or login, so we will be recording every session for you to refer back to at your convenience.  To view the webinar on reputation management, go here. 

A big thank you goes out, not only to the team at HootSuite, but to all our attendees who made our first session such a success.  If you have any additional questions or comments, either tweet them to @Apartmentscom using the hashtag #AptsTraining or leave them in the comments section below.

Stay tuned for our next webinar coming in June!

1. Set up an account and start taking pictures with Instagram.  It is an easy photo taking and sharing app that was recently purchased by Facebook, so there are big things to come!
2. Create a Pinterest board of apartment-friendly decorating ideas for your residents.
3. Partner with a popular neighborhood restaurant to provide your residents with a Facebook exclusive offer.  Post a status update with coupon code to redeem 20% off.  It will make your fans feel really special.
4. Tweet street cleaning schedules to make sure your residents don’t get tickets.
5. Take a poll on your Facebook page asking residents what brand of coffee they would like in the lobby this month, then let them know you listened!
6. Choose a resident to highlight as your Resident of the Month on Facebook in an effort to help everyone get to know their neighbors.
7. Create a Facebook group for your employees to swap ideas, ask questions, give praise for a job well done and get to know each other.  Make sure the group is set as private.
8. Start Trivia Tuesdays on Twitter and give away small prizes to your residents for correct answers.
9. Ask your residents to Like you and follow you on social media websites!  You would be surprised how simply asking will help grow your fan base.
10. Keep your LinkedIn company profile up to date with current job openings and company information.  You can recruit top talent this way.
11. Read multifamily industry blogs, like Multifamily Insiders and Apartments.com/blog, to stay on top of trends and news.
12. Start a blog that provides relevant apartment living, neighborhood and community information for your residents.
13. Respond to all comments and mentions on social media, whether positive or negative, in a timely, professional manner.
14. Create Facebook events for your community get-togethers, so residents have all the information on the website they check most often, as well as the ability to see who else is attending.
15. Tweet the weather forecast first thing every morning to help your residents decide what to wear.
16. Host a charity like-a-thon and donate a certain amount of money or volunteer hours for every new Like you get on Facebook during a period of time.
17. Add your social media profiles to all of your current marketing materials, so people know you are active on those websites.
18. Start accepting maintenance request via your Facebook wall.  Make sure to respond to each request and follow up after the job is complete.  This will show current and prospective residents how great your customer service is.
19. Create a Facebook application with your leasing office and community staff photos and bios, so your residents know who to go to with questions, as well as the names of the people that make their community run smoothly.
20. Tweet fun, easy recipes that residents can make during the work week.
21. Wish residents happy birthday on Facebook or Twitter.
22. When the first of the month is rolling around and rent is due, tweet out a reminder for residents.
23. Create a social media policy and training course for your employees to ensure they understand the importance and responsibility of online behavior.
24. Capture nice things your residents are saying about you online and repurpose them in marketing materials or in a slide show that plays on your lobby TV’s.
25. Monitor mentions of your property management company name, community name and neighborhood on social networking websites and respond accordingly.

What other fun things are you doing on social media right now?

Watch the following three-minute segment where Brown discusses the current state of the rental market, cost-cutting tips for renters and neighborhood-specific information for Chicago.

Are you seeing an impact on vacancies and rent rates, at your community, as a result of what is happening in the housing market?  We would love to hear how your hometown market compares with the Windy City.  Please leave your comments below.

1. Team Effort – Creating a social media policy at your company should be a team effort.  Gather a cross-functional group from departments like PR, legal, strategy, sales, marketing and senior leadership.  All of these people will play an important role in crafting your guidelines.

2. Common Sense – Make sure to include guidelines that you may think are common sense in your policy.  You cannot assume everyone thinks the same way and it is better to be safe than sorry.  Some examples of this would be:

• Be transparent – If you discuss industry topics, make sure your company name and position are clear and included in your profile description.
• Be respectful – The Golden Rule still applies: Treat others the way you would like to be treated.  Don’t say hurtful things about residents, the competition, coworkers or the company.
• Be professional – Post content in a professional manner and tone.  Also, never disclose company information or personal information about residents.
• Be truthful – Don’t comment anonymously on things.  Own what you are saying.  Also, if you don’t know the answer to a question, do not make one up.  Find the right person to ask and respond to the question accurately.
• Be informed – If you are speaking on a topic, make sure you are completely up to speed on it and can speak intelligently about it.

3. Make It Relatable – Make your social media policy easy for employees to relate to.  Coca-Cola does a great job with this in their policy.  They outline their company’s core values, which have been communicated to employees many times and then talk about how each value relates to social media.

4. Encourage Employee Participation – Another important piece of your policy should be encouraging your employees to participate in social media.  Logging into Facebook or going through Twitter has become the new smoke break.  Everyone needs 15 minutes to step away from work and socialize; only now it’s happening online.  Razorfish, an interactive marketing agency, does a great job with this.  The first line of their social media guidelines is if you are not using social influence marketing in your job, please get started.  This type of encouragement empowers their employees to embrace social media.

5. Enforce Your Policy – The hardest part of any policy is enforcing it, but just like your dress code or harassment policies, your social media guidelines need to be imposed.  Have steps in place to handle situations and make those steps and the consequences clear to employees.

These are just some ways to make your social media policy successful, but get creative!  Social media is an ever-evolving medium and your guidelines should reflect that.  Have you implemented a social media policy at your management company?  What was successful and what problems did you run into?  Let me know in the comments below.

Apartments.com Training Series Live! is a compilation of 30- 45 minute live webinars – at no charge!  We’re expanding on popular topics within the Apartments.com Interactive Multifamily Marketing and Socializing Your Community curriculum, plus covering a variety of important topics taught by experts in the industry such as:

-          Reputation Management

-          Raising Rent the Right Way

-          Capturing and Retaining Residents

-          Resident Event Planning

-          And more!

Register now for the first session on reputation management at noon CST on May 10^th, presented by Ben Watson, Vice President of Marketing from the popular social media monitoring tool, Hootsuite.

Can’t make it? No problem! Each session will be archived for you to reference back to at your leisure.  Are there topics you want us to cover or speakers you would like to hear?  Let us know in the comments section below.

• Details, Details, Details: Be sure to provide as much information about your property as possible; including location, amenities, floorplans and specific features renters look for when searching.
• Use Visuals to Capture Eyes:  The number of photos and videos on your ad impact the number of times and ways renters interact with your community.  Having current and accurate visual content is no longer an enhancement, it’s a requirement.
• Be Accessible to Renters:  Be available when renters want to reach you and in the way they want to reach you.  This means answering the phone, replying to email, using chat features and being ready to text within minutes of the renters’ requests.  The increasing popularity of smartphones means more renters will contact you while they are on the go. 

 Check back for more Quick Tips!

As property owners, managers or leasing agents, you understand the need to conserve energy at your apartment community.  By installing energy-efficient appliances and windows and using eco-friendly alternatives for floors, countertops and paint, you are not only significantly reducing your carbon footprint, but also banking significant savings on energy costs.  If 10,000 owners of large apartment communities change to Energy-Star appliances, the energy saved could power each of your TVs for 1,640,625 years!  While the people on the property level are doing their part to protect the environment, we want to provide you with four sustainable tips you can share with your environmentally-friendly residents—leading up to Earth Day on April 22^nd—that they can put into practice today.

1. Be a Savvy Shopper
Cut down on the amount of paper or plastic consumed by bringing a reusable shopping bag to the grocery store.  If eco-friendly shoppers forget their tote, ensure those plastic grocery bags get reused to line garbage cans or when scooping kitty litter.  Additionally, fuel and distribution costs can be reduced by shopping at local farmers’ markets instead of large chain grocery stores for produce.

2. Kick the Bottled Water Habit
Americans use four million plastic bottles every hour – but only one in four is recycled.  Instead of reaching for bottled water, use a water filter on the kitchen faucet and fill up a non-leaching, lined aluminum SIGG bottle with filtered tap water.  If 10,000 people gave up their daily bottled water habit for a year, they could keep the weight of a small elephant from emptying into the waste stream.

3. Just Say No to Junk Mail
Junk mail is more than just annoying, it’s wasteful.  If everyone in the US reduced the junk mail they receive each week by an average of 10.8 pieces per person, nearly 100 million trees could be saved each year.  There are multiple websites where people can find online forms to remove their name from junk mail lists.                                           

4. Use Power Strips to Avoid Phantom Load
Phantom load is the energy sapped by appliances when they are plugged in, but not turned on.  In the average home, this accounts for 40% of the energy bill!  Plug appliances into power strips to turn off your TV, DVD, stereo, and cell phone charger in one fell swoop.  If 10,000 people plug their cable boxes into power strips that are turned off when not watching TV, significant savings will add up to around $300,000 per year.

How do you conserve energy around your apartment community?  Do you get your residents involved?  If so, we’d love to hear what works and what may not have worked in the comments section below.

Apartments.com is once again searching for America’s best roommate in the 4th annual Roommate of the Year contest, and we need your help!  For the past three years, our winners have moved on to accomplish some amazing milestones with their winnings.  Thanks to living rent free for an entire year, our 2009 Grand Prize Winner, Keaton Davis, moved to New York City for a summer to work as an intern at the CBS Early Show.  Our 2010 winner, Andrew Prestler, was able to put his prize money toward paying off his college tuition.  Last year’s Roommate of the Year, Jesse McLaughlin, recently upgraded his roommate status to happily-ever-after, when he proposed to his girlfriend, who is also his roommate.  Jesse was also a resident at one of our advertiser’s communities!  Don’t miss out on this great opportunity to enrich one of your resident’s lives while enjoying an extra grand.   

How Residents Can Enter:

•  Submit a video entry to www.roommateoftheyear.com illustrating acts of roommate greatness for a chance to win the Grand Prize of FREE Rent for a Year + $10,000.
• Renters across the country will be entering the contest now through May 21, 2012.   

Grand Prize:

• Don’t let your residents miss out on this opportunity to compete for the Grand Prize – FREE Rent for a Year + $10,000 and the coveted title of Roommate of the Year.

What You Can Win:

• You can win, too!  If the Grand Prize Winner lives in your community, we’ll reward you with $1,000 for helping us find the Apartments.com Roommate of the Year!

How You Can Help Promote the Contest:

To help you promote the Roommate of the Year contest to your residents, Apartments.com has provided downloadable contest posters and flyers.  Showcase them throughout your community where they will most likely catch the attention of your residents:

• Hang in clubhouses, laundry rooms or other common areas
• Distribute to each resident in their mailbox or deliver to their front door
• Put information in your community’s newsletter, and post it to Facebook and Twitter
• Get creative!  We’re ready to award you with $1,000!

What are you waiting for?  Start promoting the Apartments.com Roommate of the Year contest and you could be one step closer to winning $1,000!  Enter, download promotion materials and view great promotion tips here!

Want more details about the contest?  Visit http://www.roommateoftheyear.com/.

Curtains can change the look of an entire room by making even the most boring white wall exciting!  Avoid a tilted tapestry or rickety rod by following these easy steps for hanging curtains in your apartment home.

Make sure to check back for more DIY videos!