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How to grow a student housing Instagram?
Hi guys! I am having a real struggle these days, as the pressure in my company to imprive our social media is rising. The picture we are currently giving to investors is that we are not successful and relevant, i.e. that our social media oresence does not match our company growth. The company is a premium student housing provider all accross europe, so our target audience is veey present on social media. Especially tiktok and instagram. Today in a worskshop, the majority voted to kick out tiktok out of our strategy until we can improve our instagram/Linkedin. Our views on TT are hovering around 250 so everyone thought its not worth the effort at this moment. For Linkedin, we already have some clear action steps, but I am quite worried about instagram.
You can find our IG @my.milestone. To compare, check out our competitors @thesocialhub and @the_fizz_ . As you can see, all of our engagement is plummetting, but we are doing better than Fizz. We should try to grow to at least 5k by the end of the year, but in the last few days, we have been just losing followers.
My questions are:
1) is it realistic to expect to grow on instagram with the current algorithm changes?2) If so, how would a real estate/student housing brand grow? We are also considering paid ad campaigns here. I saw a few real estate accounts posting aesthetic photos of their interior, so I am thinking of implementing a bit more of that in our strategy.
3) I read from different marketing sources (including reddit) that 3 hashtags per post are the way to go. Does that hold true?
4) Some of our competitors have high followers and almost no engagement. Are they buying ghost followers? Should we also do the same to improve the forst impression of our page? I know that I personally make a choice between 2 brands based on follower count at first glance. Its almost an automatic reaction. Do you choose a jewerly brand with 500 followers or 50k?
5) Do you have any other suggestions how to push ourselves in the algorithm? We create both reels and posts/stories
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1 Reply
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Okay I took a look and here are some initial thoughts:
-The IG focuses a lot on student activities but almost nothing on the actual housing. What do the actual dorms look like? What amenities are there? (laundry, cleaning supplies, kitchen, etc.) as an introvert, I never went to a single activity my dorm hosted, but I picked it because it had the nicest rooms.
-You have housing in multiple countries but only post in English. Does that actually reflect the dominant languages of the residents? You may connect with more people if you include captions in multiple languages.
-Getting rid of tiktok is a mistake. It’s the primary social media platform of your target demographic. Sure, you’re only getting 250 views now, but if you keep at it it will continue to go up.
-Do you actually connect with residents on LinkedIn? I can’t imagine that’s the place most people go to learn about a dorm.Now to your questions:
1. Growth is definitely slower these days, and can be down right stagnant for certain metrics. I find that older clients tend to still focus on likes, comments, and followers, but more accurate metrics these days are views, shares, and saves.2. Showcase the actual housing more and less on the residents. Running some social ads on IG can help get you in front of new people. IG is also pretty open these days about prioritizing profiles that spend money on their platform. However, we’ve found that ad spend gets more reach and goes further on TikTok.
3. 3-5 hashtags are the way to go these days. Focus on captions for search function instead.
4. Followers don’t translate to engagement these days. Maybe they bought them, maybe not. As I mentioned before, users engage differently these days. They tend to like and comment less, but share and save more. Plus, the algorithm serves up content regardless if someone is following or not, so users have less incentive to follow these days.
5. Just keep going. Contrary to what some on this subreddit would have you believe, there’s no magic answer. Post consistently. Try new things. Use trends. Make stories interactive. Do video content. But I think most importantly you’re going to have to educate your company and investors on the updated status of the social media landscape. Realistically, you’re not going to see social media growth the way you did even a year ago.
Hope this helped!
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