What is a Social Media Referral?

Imagine a world where your residents invited all of their friends and family members into a huge room and you had the opportunity to market your community. Now imagine this same crowd, but instead of taking the stage by yourself, your residents joined you and boasted over a megaphone, “I love my community; you should come check it out!” Fortunately, this is no longer a fleeting dream but a burgeoning reality. This dream is real and it’s the Social Media Referral.

At its core, a Social Media Referral is no different from a traditional resident referral. Whether the resident refers their friends offline at a dinner party or online through Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or email, the desire to live near friends and family will continue to drive referrals. While offline referrals are typically one-to-one, and the message rarely makes it beyond a resident’s closest friends, social media referrals leverage the reach of residents’ own social networks and empower residents to quickly reach out to hundreds of friends.

So how valuable is this personal recommendation? According to a recent Nielsen Co study described in the Wall Street Journal, including information about individuals a person knows in an ad, boosts recall by 68% and doubles awareness of the brand’s message. In a world where Facebook has more than 500 million active users, the average user has 130 friends and spends nearly 24 hours on the website every month (http://bit.ly/12oAN), it is no surprise that participating residents are three times more likely to close a referral lease than non-participating residents!

Resident referrals play an integral role in the growth and stability of multifamily communities across America, and this tried-and-trusted recruitment tool has gone unassisted for many years. Social Media Referrals turn this one-to-one conversation into one-to-many, and while the message remains the same, the distribution is incomparable.

We invite you to visit our main site to learn more about leveraging your residents’ social networks to increase referral-based leases.