By Amanda Patterson
As of July 2010, social media accounted for 11 percent of all time spent online in the United State. Based on these numbers, some self-storage businesses have been jumping in head firstbut should they? Lets take a look at some critical elements to social media and how it could affect your self-storage business.
Customer Service
Social media is often leveraged as a customer-service tool. Facebook walls and Twitter messages are a great place to ask and answer questions, and create a dialogue with potential customers who can be seen by all. For a more private consultation, the Facebook message feature might be your conversation tool of choice. Personal interactions let clients know that youre important to them.
Events
Social media can also make sense for storage when it comes to promoting an event at your facility. According to a news items in the Self Storage Associations Globe magazine, Store Self Storage of Palm Beach Gardens successfully used social media to get 1,000 people to attend their yard sale and 800-plus people to attend other events.
Hosting events at your storage facility allows people to see the facility in a unique and fun environment. Social media can be a great tool to help you spread the word. If you have a Facebook fan page, you can create an event and invite your fans via status updates to RSVP. You can also create Facebook ads that drive them to your website for more information (via a landing page) or to your Facebook event page.
Facebook Advertising
Facebook ads can be a cost-effective way to geo-target your customers and drive them to your storage facility. Because theyre pay-per-click, you can set the limit on the ad spend and target them based on specific regions and age or gender demographics. Facebook allows you to target ads based on birthdays, likes, interests, connections, education and more. However, these ads will only target people who have opted to include that information in their profile, and such precise targeting could be too limiting.
The Dissatisfied Customer
Social media is powerful because its a public forum and gives your customers a voice. Thats also what makes it unsettling to companies that are used to controlling the conversation about their brand. Using privacy settings to manage posts before theyre published to your wall is one way of censoring unhappy customers, but companies still have no control over what others say on their own walls.
If a bad experience at your facility is tweeted or posted on a social-media site, use your discretion to address the issue. Some comments are best responded to on the public forum, while others may require speaking to the dissatisfied customer over the phone. Regardless, social media is an opportunity for you to promptly and publically respond with resolution of the issue.
Strategy
If youre thinking about dipping your foot into social waters, be strategic about it. Make sure your social media efforts are supporting a bigger strategy, whether its your customer service strategy, your event and PR strategy, or your marketing strategy. Have objectives and determine up front how youll measure success. Dont just put up a Facebook page and expect people to like you. Give them a reason.
With 10 years experience in marketing and advertising, Amanda Patterson manages the public relations, social and communications strategy for G5, a provider of vertical-specific local marketing solutions that help self-storage properties get found online, generate more qualified leads, convert more leads into new tenants, track marketing performance including offline, and optimize the marketing sources with the best return on investment.