Photo by Innova Property

Do you have a social media strategy in place for your HMO business? An effective social media strategy can allow you to reach a much bigger audience and fast-track relationships with investors, landlords, and tenants.

Through social media, you can engage directly with the people in your community and build a brand, profile, and authority and market your business. So, if you’re scaling up your HMO business but need to draw on other resources, then an effective social media strategy is essential. 

Read below or listen to the full episode on The HMO Podcast to understand the numerous opportunities social media can provide and an eight-step strategy that will help you boost your social media and rocket your results!

The Opportunities Social Media Can Bring

Social media can provide an endless supply of opportunities, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. The key is understanding how you need to use it effectively to serve your business and your personal objectives and how to get the best out of what you do.

Through social media, I’ve been able to raise millions of pounds of investment, been invited on podcasts, written for magazines, been interviewed in the Sunday Times and for BBC radio, and one of my projects was even recently picked up by Channel 4!

8 Points to Help You Create a Social Media Strategy 

Having a plan for your social media is more important than ever. Here are eight points that serve as a great foundation for any social media strategy! 

1. Set clear objectives.

For starters, you need to get clear on your objectives for social media and write them down on paper. You should do this in the same way that you set clear financial objectives for your HMO business. 

Set monthly, quarterly, and annual targets. This will give you something to work towards and a way to measure and compare your results. Then, you need to start reverse engineering how you’re going to get there.

2. Brainstorm everything you could do on social media.

Think about all of the different social media channels you could use, the types of content that you could create, and how you could share this content and who with. Brainstorm all of these details and write them down.

3. Prioritise what you think will bring the best results. 

Then, prioritise the channels and types of content that you think will bring the best results – not necessarily what you’re most comfortable with or what you understand the best. This has to be a very logic-based decision.

It all depends on what your objectives are, who you’re targeting, who you are as an individual, what you’re best suited to, and how you’re going to make the best use of the content that you create.

4. Plan your strategy and be realistic.

Now you need to actually plan your strategy of delivery. What, when, and where are you going to post? But you need to make sure that the strategy you outline is realistic and that you’ll actually be able to deliver on it!

The great thing about social media is you don’t have to overthink it, but most people do. For a lot of HMO investors, the easiest strategy is to simply document what you’re doing and share it. 

5. Start creating a surplus of content. 

Once you’ve done all of this planning and know the content you’re going to create, you need to start actually creating the content, which is the hardest part. But don’t just start creating content – create a surplus of content and share it consistently.

This will allow you to be consistent with your social media presence even when things come up. You also need to have a process for storing, recording, and keeping up with your social media content.

6. Repurpose your content across different channels.

With all of the content you create, think about how you can repurpose it, push it onto other social media channels, and multiply the reach. This is where you can be very clever about how much value you can get from one single piece of content. 

You can share the repurposed content at different times and tweak it a little bit, so you don’t have to start from scratch every single time. But be organised and keep a record of when the content is going out on what channels. 

7. Consistently engage with your audience.

You also need to commit time to engaging with your audience. Make sure you’re answering questions and responding to comments on your own posts but also engage with other people’s posts and share your audience’s content. 

The algorithms are much more favourable to you if you’re liking, sharing, and commenting on other people’s posts, and people really notice that too. If you do this effectively, you’ll find that you’ll build your audience much more quickly!

8. Review your results.

Make sure you take the time to measure your results and then assess and evaluate your business’s performance on social media at least weekly but then monthly and annually as well. Learn from what you’re doing and improve your strategy so you can leverage social media as best as you possibly can.

This is an active process. Don’t just rely on the algorithm or assume that you’re creating the right content! And as social media algorithms change sometimes, something that has been working can all of a sudden stop being effective. So, you need to keep up with this, rather than continue producing the same content for months before realising it’s not working.

Those are the eight important points of an effective social media strategy! If you build a plan around these, you’ll have much more success online. 

If you want to chat about this, come on over to The HMO Community Facebook Group. And if you’d like to get into the details of how to scale and systemise your HMO business, sign up for The HMO Roadmap!

About the Author:

Andy Graham is the founder and the lead trainer at The HMO Roadmap! He is also the co-founder of The HMO Mastermind and Smart Property, a specialist HMO property investment and management company. He writes as a regular columnist in different magazines about a variety of HMO topics and is the host of The HMO Podcast! Follow Andy on Instagram!