Integrating social media metrics into your marketing metrics

by drm on October 14, 2009

I’m an admirer of Eric Brown, owner of Urbane Apartments outside of Detroit. He’s a practical-minded entrepreneur who’s turned his if-I-can’t-touch-it-it’s-not-real sensibility to social marketing in order to drive prospective renters to his units.

The results have been well-documented. Eric has experimented with a lot of different approaches to using social media tools to create destinations for current and prospective residents. Some have worked, some have not, but Eric has tied each experiment to his actual results.

In a recent post on his blog, he distills these lessons into a new set of metrics that can be used to help determine the effectiveness of the social media tool set in a larger marketing mix. It’s a great starting point for conversation. One thing that you can be sure of: these are things that Eric has tried and found that work.

The link and some clips are below.

clipped from www.apartmentveteran.com
1) How Many Monthly Web Visitors do you have Per Unit,
2) How many Facebook Friends do you have Per Unit
3) How many MySpace Friends do you have per Unit
4) How many Twitter Followers do you have Per Unit,
Your Community Must Be Larger Than Your Apartment Community.
Once you have documented these new metrics, you can then start to understand just how large your Community must be in order to provide enough rental and leasing activity to keep your asset full. As you see these new metric numbers starting to climb, you can get clearer on What To Drop, and can begin to watch Your Cost Per Lease Start to Decline.
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  • UrbaneWay
    Hi Dan,
    Thanks so much for the nice comments, much appreciated.

    I think that a lot of folks entering the playing field of Social Media Marketing, specific to apartments and multifamily start out only thinking in terms of the size of their physical community, of say (300) units. I surely agree that you focus first on those (300) residents, but your over all Social Media Community must be much larger in order to be effective, and as you grow your community we are starting to experience velocity, in that the group as a whole start to help you grow the overall community. It is pretty cool.

    Another fascinating point, which somewhat separates apartment operators from most other businesses types, are, They do not need to grow their business each year with year over year sales increases. Meaning, that (300) unit apartment community only ever needs (150) new rentals each year in order to stay full. (This assumes the management company is doing a reasonable job at managing the asset) It makes dialing in exactly how many leads and how much tarffic you need to stay full very predictable.

    What happens once you have organically grown your "Larger Community" to drive enough traffic for say (200) rentals per year, but you only need (150), Either you can stop doing something you are doing, which lowers the Cost per Lease, or Raise Rents, which is something we haven't seen for some time.

    Lastly, another determining factor, is how many Influencers does it take to pump up your 'Larger Community" I think not very many, and once you figure that out, and spend a disproportionate amount of time and resources on the Influencers, that leverage takes a compounding effect on your Social Media Program.
  • Hey Eric, interesting point on calculating the predictability and amount of leads required in consistently sized communities, but can you explain what you mean by influencers?
  • UrbaneWay
    Hi Adam, Thanks for the note,
    Influencers in this sense are the 1%-2% of the group of evangelists who Lead the Way, and start to create a movement. Every Brand has them, even the most mundane run of the mill product offerings have a following, and within that following are the Influencer's that are begging for a platform to articulate and share their passion for the product offering. Think of things like Barg's Root Bear or WD40, both of which have large followings. Kind of makes you scratch your head, but they are there.

    The various tools and channels of Social Media have allowed us to loosely organize and lead the Influencers. It should be noted, that the Influencers are NOT always within the customer base of the Brand, and in fact at Urbane, 40% of our leading evangelists were not residents, although were of like demographic and thought patterns.
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