For many communities, the conversation has changed over the past 3 years from “why” or “should” we be involved in social media, to “where” and “how” social media should be done.

A major component of answering those questions effectively is understanding which social sites your residents are concentrated. Communities should follow, not try to lead, their residents across the social web. Get The Clicks in Orlando fl can provide you more information about seo (Search Engine Optimization), ranking and much more.

When I am delivering seminars or talk about this Best SEO Company a common question I am asked is something along the line, “My boss thinks none of our residents will want to connect with us on Facebook, but I think they will. What do I do?”

 

 

 

 

 

Here are 4 tricks to find out where your residents are hanging out in social media:

  1. 1.      Hire a detectives to help your efforts
    Rapleaf is the leaders in the emerging field of social anthropology. It’s ingenious!

 

You provide a list of your residents’ email addresses, and this services figure out how (and who) among your residents are on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and niche social networks, what their “likes” are, and other important details.

2. Ask, Ask, Ask
The most obvious way of finding out where your residents are hanging out in social media is the least utilized. We have to ASK them. If you have a contact us form, an online lead generation form, an email newsletter sign-up, are you simply asking for name, address, and email address? You have to add data collection fields for Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin (at a minimum). Guess what! We are moving into an era of “Big Data” and if you don’t start collecting this information now you will be playing catch-up for years!

  1. 2.      Email is about being social friendly
    Have you added links to your social hangouts in your emails? Have you added the ability for email recipients to share content on Twitter, Facebook, You Tube and elsewhere? If your community sends email routinely, you need to integrate email and social immediately. I receive emails from apartment communities every single day of the week and rarely to do see an email signature that shows me how to connect with them.

4. Gmail Searching is fast and simple
Twitter, Facebook and other social hangouts have incorporated functionality that allows you to see whether your Gmail contacts are using the services, and invite them to connect with you. While this integration is intended for personal use, you can utilize it for your business, too. Here’s how:

  1. Take a list of your residents’ email addresses, and create a .csv file (you only need email addresses, not names, mailing address, etc.)
  2. Next, create a free account on gmail.com specifically for this purpose (you don’t want to be doing this on an existing account)
  3. Third, upload the .csv to your Gmail account.
  4. Now, go to Twitter and create a brand new account using your special new Gmail email address. On Step Two “Find Your Friends” of the Twitter sign-up process, select Gmail. Bam! Twitter automatically reads all of the email addresses of your residents stored in Gmail, allowing you to track the number on Twitter and/or follow them immediately.
  5. Now, set up a new Facebook account using your new Gmail address. On Step One “Find Friends” of the Facebook sign-up process, indicate that you have a Gmail account, and follow the simple instructions. Bingo! All of your residents on Facebook are presented to you, and you should be able to become their “friends” with a single click.

A few years ago I uploaded a list of approximately 23,000 subscribers to my TGTW email updates (you’re a subscriber, right?) and was able to track down more than 400 people on Twitter, and 1,000 PLUS on Facebook that I had not connected with yet. Total cost? Zero dollars, and roughly 30 minutes of work.

 

As the social Web becomes ever more interconnected, understanding how your residents are connected (or connectable) to your community in social media is a sizable part of the success equation.

Are you a social media detective?