Only a few apartment owners and management companies are advertising their apartment communities on YouTube. And for the ones that do, they only get a few hundred viewers. The most I've seen is nearly 2,300 viewers for Apartment Home Tours.
The problem with most apartment YouTube postings, like Apartment Home Tours (AHT) post
is that they miss the essence of YouTube and Social Networking in general.
Social Networking is raw and authentic. Take for instance a YouTube posting from User FlamingJune5dwj. Here she gives a 6:23 video tour of her apartment and received over 17,800 viewers!
Think about her video for 2 seconds. She posted a simple video about her apartment and over 17,500 people watched it. Hence the power of Social Networking sites like YouTube or Facebook. When was the last time nearly 18,000 people focused specifically on one of your apartment units? And how much do you normally pay in advertising to reach that many people who may or may not view your ad?
Her video is successful because it leverages two basic concepts: Authenticity and Community. The irony is that the wild success of Social Networking sites, like YouTube or FaceBook, is that its based on developing and nurturing a "community" of people familiar which each other - something we apartment owners try to create as well within our apartments. Why wouldn't we shift our thinking and advertising and market according to how most people think and buy in the first place?
Here's an idea: Have your best tenants create their own commercials for your apartment communities. Place a telephone tracking number in the video so that when a prospective tenant calls in you can actually track back the lead to the source commercial. Then, reward your successful tenants with free rent, cash or whatever incentive you think will work best.
Who is better to sell your apartment vacancies than your existing tenants?
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