Do Apartment Communities Really Need Social Media? Here’s Why the Answer Is Yes

This blog post from Digible, written by Maddie Taylor, makes the case for why apartment communities require social media for effective marketing. The argument is clear: social is no longer optional. (Hasn’t been for years.) It’s essential for building reputation, visibility, and driving leases:

Lifestyle-driven visuals help prospects imagine what it would be like to live there. Even before a community opens, establishing a social presence creates early awareness and differentiation in a crowded market. Residents become powerful advocates with their tagged user-generated posts, adding authenticity that no polished brochure can match.

Where the buy-in gets complicated is attribution. A highly engaging post might generate 100,000 views, 100s of likes, comments, and shares, yet show zero tracked leads in a CRM. Even with UTM tracking “link in bio” and call tracking phone numbers, social lurkers rarely immediately convert to leads.

With prospects ogling up to 15 sources before scheduling a tour, the website will typically always appear to be the sole dominate source. Prospects may save a post or research a community later, as they prefer to stay in-app within the social platform and continue scrolling.

Social channels encourage in-app behavior. Clicks out to a website are limited compared to the attention spent on content inside the feed. Often, browsers don’t pass the referral source to Google Analytics, and GA then tosses the user visit into “Direct”. Have you noticed Direct traffic numbers continuing to be larger? The “dark social” aspect also has links shared via DMs, email and Messaging tools sending the user visit to Direct.

What social truly excels at is building familiarity and aspiration. Those are the emotional drivers that turn an impression into interest, and interest into a signed lease. It also transcends at humanizing the brand and providing humor and infotainment via trends.

Most analytics platforms are built around last-click attribution, which heavily favors channels like paid search or direct visits. Social tends to be a discovery and inspiration channel. People scroll, they see something intriguing, they remember it, and when the time comes, they search or go directly to the website. The credit gets assigned elsewhere, even though the first impression happened on social.

Social is often the start of the journey, but it rarely gets the credit as the closer. Vanity metrics aren’t the end goal, but they’re not meaningless either. They’re the visible evidence of attention and awareness. The real problem is measurement, not impact.

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