Creating a Blog for Your College Residents: Two Areas to Contemplate

By Danielle Wirsansky on July 27, 2017

Creating a blog for your property can be a great way for you as a property manager to keep your residents engaged. If you use it correctly, it can help keep your current residents engrossed and attract new residents to the property.

If students are your target demographic for renters, then you know that utilizing the internet is going to be your best bet to snare them. Read on for some ideas to consider when creating a blog for your college residents!

pexels.com

Content

Content is easily one of the most important parts of your blog but it can also be one of the most difficult to figure out. Not only does your writing need to be good (grammatically correct and so on so as not to repel any potential residents), it needs to be on relevant topics that relate to the property and student renters while remaining interesting. Remaining interesting is so very important. While your blog might get crucified for having poor grammar, no one will even visit the blog if the content is of no interest to your residents.

It is really important to plan out and plan ahead what you want to post because deciding at the last minute might make you make a poor choice in blog content, which could be the downfall of your blog.

Think about what you might have liked to have read or any information you would have liked to have known as a college student, living out on your own. College is the first time that many of these student renters are living on their own, completely in charge of their domain. They are probably not sure of all the things that they need to do in order to maintain their own abode. How can you help them out? How can you remind them of things that they need to do in order to be responsible adults and take care of the property that they are renting from you correctly?

Use your blog posts to gently remind and guide these student residents how to be responsible and take care of their property the way that they should. Illuminate them, but in engaging ways that will make them glad that they read the post, learned something new, and be able to apply it to their everyday life.

Do they know that they should let the water drip when the weather is very cold so that the pipes do not freeze? Make a post about it! Are they aware of command strips as alternatives to drilling holes into the walls? Make a post about it! There are many little, underrated topics that you might overlook, thinking they are common sense to write about, but students often do not know or do not think about a lot of these things. They are prone to make mistakes. But as long as your posts are kind and informative, not patronizing or condescending, student renters will be glad for the blog posts and keep coming back for more.

pexels.com

Comments

Another aspect of a blog that you should consider is whether you want to turn on the option for visitors to leave comments. The internet can be a vicious, vicious place nowadays. Sometimes the comments can be a constructive area of the blog where student renters can ask questions to clarify a point in a post or simply to ask a related question. But it can also be a negative space, where internet trolls can run amok and drag your post and blog through the mud. It could be people leaving nasty comments or it could even be a bot that leaves spam and inappropriate content in your comments section.

If you feel that monitoring the comment section in order to answer questions or to keep trolls off the page is too big of a commitment for you at present, then you can turn the ability to comment off. It is better to turn them off than allowing anyone to write anything, willy-nilly. However, by doing so you lose a really important way for your student renters to engage with the blog, and thus you, which is the whole point of having the blog in the first place.

Without the comments section, it can be harder for residents to get in touch with you. Say you have posted a reminder about the upcoming deadline to renew the lease. Your student renter has a question and wants to comment on the blog, but there is no comment section. Baffled, they are not sure how to contact the leasing office. Perhaps they feel uncomfortable speaking on the phone and are in class during the leasing office’s hours. They are not sure of the email address, either, and besides, emailing is just another step of work for them to do. They end up not asking the question, and they end up not renewing their lease.

This is surely an exaggerated version of events, but you can see the train of thought here as to why turning off the comment section might negatively impact your property. Either way you choose, you have to decide what you feel more comfortable handling.

Follow Uloop

Apply to Write for Uloop News

Join the Uloop News Team

Discuss This Article

Get Student Housing News Monthly

Back to Top

Log In

Contact Us

Upload An Image

Please select an image to upload
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format
OR
Provide URL where image can be downloaded
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format

By clicking this button,
you agree to the terms of use

By clicking "Create Alert" I agree to the Uloop Terms of Use.

Image not available.

Add a Photo

Please select a photo to upload
Note: must be in .png, .gif or .jpg format