Is your coliving space using Instagram as a marketing channel? If not, you are likely missing out on new members as Instagram is one of the best ways to drive enquiries and grow your brand community.
Instagram is a particularly important platform for coliving brands because it’s where your audience already spends time – research conducted by Hootsuite showed that 25-34-year-olds represent the largest audience on Instagram, followed closely by the 18-24-year-old age group.
In this article, we break down exactly how you can use Instagram for your coliving brand, from strategy through to measuring success. Let’s dive in…
First step: Get a deeper understanding of your coliving audience
In order to succeed on Instagram – or on any marketing channel for that matter – it’s vital to take the time to understand your audience beyond factors like age, gender and location. While demographic data like this is valuable, you should also consider your target audience’s interests, values and motivations as well as how they behave on Instagram, the accounts they follow and the content they engage with. Check out our recent Instagram post for 5 ways to get to know your audience which outlines how you can gather this information.
Once you have this information, you can then build it into member personas which are essentially fictional members of your coliving space who represent target member segments. As well as being important for your marketing efforts, having personas in place can help your coliving space to attract and retain members by creating products, events and content that appeal to them. Win-win!
Outline your Instagram strategy
Once you have defined your audience and developed a clear understanding of what they are looking for from your coliving brand on Instagram, it’s time to outline your strategy. While it can be tempting to jump right in and start posting, a clear strategy is crucial in ensuring your Instagram efforts are supporting your wider business goals.
Start by defining your coliving brand’s goals for Instagram – do you want to increase member enquiries, reach new target audiences or grow an online community to match your onsite community? When you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve, break this down further by outlining the tactics you will use to reach your goals and how you intend to measure your success. We suggest setting overarching goals each quarter and revising each month to stay on track!
A strong Instagram strategy for any coliving brand should also contain a competitor analysis, guidelines to your tone of voice and information on the type of content you will be posting in the form of content pillars. You should also include a posting schedule to ensure you stay active on the platform – we recommend posting on the grid at least 3 times a week, on Stories at least 5 times and a week and utilising Instagram’s new features like Reels and Guides at least once a week (more on this later!).
Click here to download our free printable member persona template.
Start creating content for your coliving space
Now for the fun part – it’s time to start creating and gathering content for your Instagram channel. We’re sure you have already heard that content is key when using any social media platform, but this is especially true when it comes to Instagram. Instagram is a visual-first platform so audiences expect to see good quality images and videos tailored to their interests. To stand out from your competitors, you need to give your followers unique and creative content that resonates with them while showcasing your brand.
Here are some Instagram content ideas for coliving spaces to get you started:
- Highlight your facilities: do you have a gym that members can work out in? Or is there a coworking space for members to work from? Maybe you have great coffee or F&B on-site?
- Speak to people: if you have current members who are happy to be featured on your Instagram, then get them involved with member Q&As. And remember to include your team – people love to see the humans behind your brand so don’t be shy!
- Showcase your experience: community is at the core of the coliving concept, so create content that shows how you bring people together. Do you host exercise classes, family meals or house happy hours? Great – be sure to share this with your audience as we do for our client Mason & Fifth (example below).
Build trust with user-generated content
User-generated content is content related to your coliving brand that’s created and posted by your members or guests. This type of content is particularly powerful in building trust with your audience – let’s face it, we all tend to trust what other people are saying about a business more than we trust what the business itself is saying.
By resharing photos and videos of guest experiences, you will help to make your brand become more authentic in the eyes of your audience. It also takes some of the pressure off you and your team for creating content and you will find that the quality of user-generated photos and videos is often high. Just take this post by Outpost Club as an example:
If you struggle to find user-generated content, don’t worry – there are ways you can encourage members to share their experience online. You could host monthly competitions with a different content theme or – if you think they would be willing to – you could even have a member do an ‘Instastory takeover’ on your account to show an authentic day living in your space.
Make ‘em laugh
One of the main reasons people spend time on social media is to be entertained so don’t be afraid to be funny – adding a bit of humour to your feed can really elevate your brand. You can post specific memes and other types of content that are relevant to your brand’s tone of voice, just like POHA house did here:
Make the most of Instagram’s MANY features
When gathering content, it’s important to consider all of Instagram’s features – not just grid posts. Using a combination of grid posts, Reels, IGTV, Guides and Stories is the best way to grow your audience and engagement. Not only will these features help you reach a much wider audience, but they will also help you to keep your audience interested and to showcase the unique experience you offer in creative ways that will keep your followers interested.
A few examples of this could include:
- Use the Reel feature to introduce your team in a fun way (be sure to keep an eye out for viral content that could be replicated for your team members to partake in for this!)
- Want to shout about one of your onsite activities in more detail? Film and upload a video to IGTV showing your residents taking part
- To showcase your location, how about writing a handy IG guide to your neighbourhood’s best restaurants?
- Host a quiz on Stories using the poll feature to find out more about your audience and keep them entertained
Set up your Highlights to showcase your coliving space
Highlights are another valuable tool on Instagram as they allow you to easily showcase the content you want your followers to see first. Plus, you can have more than one highlight-reel split them into categories, such as ‘community’,’ ‘daily activities,’ and ‘accommodation’.’
To get the most out of this feature, we suggest focusing on the core elements of your coliving experience – such as ‘community’,’ ‘daily activities,’ and ‘accommodation’ – and categorising your content this way. You don’t want to have too many highlight reels, as this can get messy and it’s unlikely a user will click through them so use this feature for your most valuable information and content. And be sure to keep the content on your Highlights regularly updated!
Outsite showcase their content well with their curated highlight reels:
Utilise hashtags and location tags
If you want your Instagram post to be seen by the maximum number of potential members, then hashtags and location tags are your best friends.
Hashtags are used on Instagram to categorize posts so they can be found by others searching for similar content or to find posts about specific topics. Posts with even one hashtag receive an average 12.6% more engagement than posts without. You can use hashtags on grid posts, Stories and IGTV. To find relevant hashtags for your audience, we recommend doing some research into what your audience and competitors are using. You can use hashtag generator tools online, but in our experience they don’t always yield the best results.
Popular Instagram hashtags for coliving brands include #colivingspace, #colivinglife and #colivingcommunity. We recommend using between 10-20 relevant hashtags on each post and experimenting to find the ones that work best for you. We also recommend creating your own branded hashtag to help you interact with your community and organise user-generated content.
Location tags are also important on Instagram for coliving brands, as they allow your post to show up in other people’s feeds if they have interest in your location. For example, let’s say your coliving space is in New York. If an Instagram user is planning to move to New York in the future, they may search the location tag for ‘New York’ or for the neighbourhood they are looking to move to on Instagram to get an idea of the vibe. If you have tagged your location in your post, then they might see your post in their feed and decide to follow you.
NineColiving’s feed is a great example to showcase both of these features. As you can see in this post, they utilise both location tags and relevant hashtags:
Stay active on your account
Engaging with other users on Instagram through meaningful comments and replies is another hugely important element of your strategy. It’s not enough to just schedule your posts and forget about your feed – people expect a personal touch from brands on social media and are much more likely to trust brands who engage with them in an authentic way online.
We recommend setting aside time each week (or day, if you have a dedicated team) to engage with other Instagram users by commenting and liking their posts, responding to comments on your own feed and replying to all of your direct messages.
One thing we don’t recommend for engagement is using bots – while this can be tempting, it often results in spammy comments and liking posts that are irrelevant to your brand. Social media users are a savvy bunch and they are likely to know when you’re using a bot vs when there’s a human behind your brand. While it’s more time consuming, genuine engagement trumps a cut-and-paste approach every time.
Always check your data
Get in the habit of regularly checking the Insights section on your Instagram profile. This contains valuable data that will give you key insights (see what they did there?) into how your content is performing and which posts are resonating with your audience.
Through Insights you can find out important metrics such as your follower growth rate, video views, engagement rate, impressions, and even when the best time of day to post is. You can also see which content has performed best and – just as importantly – which content has not performed very well. This information should inform your future content and allow you to measure your success on the platform.
Insights also break down your Instagram followers by their specific demographics like age group, gender, and location. All of this information will help you continue to develop a better understanding of your audience (remember step 1?) and ensure your coliving brand’s Instagram marketing goes from strength to strength.
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We can help you grow your coliving brand on social media…
Stay the Night work with innovative businesses around the world that are changing the way people stay, work and play. We have created strategies and managed accounts for some of the world’s leading coliving brands.
If you’re a coliving operator who is looking to drive growth, engage new audiences and grow your member base, then drop us a message and let’s see how we can support you.
