Fargo Moorhead Apartment Association

What Residents Are Saying About Social Networking


Facebook, FourSquare, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter – everywhere we turn social networking has penetrated our personal and professional lives. It has become one of the hottest subjects in business and during the last year the multifamily industry has started to embrace social networking. Nearly every media outlet and industry conference dedicates time and resources to sing the praises of this important communication channel, but social networking has created a plethora of questions for today’s owner/operators. How can we engage it, when do we initiate a program, who is going to maintain it and what benefits it’s going to deliver once a social networking strategy is in place?

In light of social networking’s explosive growth, one of the most important questions has been overlooked, how do residents use social networking at the community level? If your community has implemented or is considering implementing a social networking strategy, you need to attend the “Resident’s Use and Perceptions of Social Media and the Multifamily Industry: Strategies and Tools to Evaluate Your Community’s Online Involvement” session at the 2010 NAA Education Conference and Exposition. On Thursday, June 24th at 9 a.m. a panel of social networking experts from the multifamily industry will share their views and opinions about social networking best practices.

The session is based on an ongoing survey, developed and implemented by J Turner Research, a leading multifamily market research firm, to examine residents’ use and perceptions of their community’s social networking presence. The program was started in January of 2010 and surveys will continue to be distributed to residents indefinitely, providing an enormous database to identify emerging trends. To date 43,548 residents have been invited to participate in the survey and 10,209 residents (27%) have provided responses regarding their use of social networking.

Our panel of multifamily and social networking experts, which include Joseph Batdorf, principal of J Turner Research, Mike Whaling, president of 30 Lines, Robert Turnbull, president and CEO of RentWiki, and Jamie Gorski, senior vice president of corporate marketing for the Bozutto Group, will dissect the survey results as well as offering insights to successful benchmarking, internal management vs. outsourcing social networking initiatives. The session is guaranteed to be educational, informative and in some cases, quite surprising.

The information presented at this session will no doubt help you structure or improve any owner / operator’s social networking strategy. If you’ve ever asked yourself any of these questions, you should be in the room to hear the answers!

How important is a community’s social networking page for communicating with residents?

• Do residents use social networking to log a complaint? Ask a question? Place a maintenance request? Renew a lease? Research the community?
• What social networking sites do my community’s residents belong to?
• As a resident, have you ever visited a community’s social networking page?

Find out what your residents are saying about social networking so you can build a program that is engaging, effective and successful.

In 2003, Joseph Batdorf co-founded J Turner Research, one of the nation’s leading providers of market research specific to the multifamily industry and currently serves as president. Each month the company surveys more than 50,000 apartment residents and prospects to measure customer satisfaction levels at individual communities. Prior to launching J Turner Research, Batdorf was founder and president of AmRent.

Join Joseph Batdorf at the National Apartment Association’s 2010 Education Conference and Exposition in New Orleans on June 24 from 9:00 a.m. for his education session “Resident's Use and Perceptions of Social Media and the Multifamily Industry: Strategies to Evaluate Your Community's Online Presence.”



Written by: Joseph Batdorf, 5/25/10

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