What a strange weekend. Not only were we battling with AC calls, due to the heat wave in the Midwest in our portfolio with a limited maintenance staff, coupled with the Fourth of July holiday, the AC was out in the condominium where I live. Needless to say, the holiday didn’t start off so well, but then it got much worse than the 90-degree temperatures on Saturday morning, and all within a few minutes.

We manage a variety of Facebook fan pages for clients, both apartment management companies and retail clients. We publish more than 1,000 Facebook posts per month and more than 6,000 Twitter posts per month on behalf of our clients. The point is always to drive some sort of engagement, hopefully good, positive engagement. As marketers know, sometimes airing on the side of being provocative can yield great results. However, that can be a slippery slope, as we found out Saturday morning.

We test ideas and strategies on our own portfolio first to ferret out what works and what doesn’t, and we have been fooling around with adding pictures to each Facebook post. Similar to a blog post, a Facebook post with a picture seems to drive an enhanced result. With that, you need to create a narrative with each picture. We have also been testing posting times and the like. One thing we clearly learned this weekend is that 1) your fans are listening and watching, and 2) your fans are apartment prospects.

Unfortunately, we learned that at the expense of canceled rentals, some that we know of, and likely others that we aren’t aware of, all before 9:00 a.m. on Saturday. The debate isn’t about what caused the outrage, but how closely folks really are paying attention to what you are saying and doing online. The post in reference was of bad taste and a mistake. We apologized and removed the post within 30 minutes of it going up. One wouldn’t think that that many folks are awake and pursing Facebook early on a Saturday of a holiday weekend, but they are.

I guess another thing to ponder here is that the apartment business has a rule and policy for nearly everything under the sun. We have been quick to criticize that approach, as it stifles creativity and promotes fear in the organization as a whole. That said, it isn’t okay to run wild, either. What happened to us this weekend raises the question of what rules should apply to your social media marketing. And, I have said before that if something bad goes you can take it down. Just know there may well be a black eye from it. The good news is, black eyes heal if you do the right thing.

Eric Brown’s background is rooted in the rental and real estate industries. He founded metro Detroit’s Urbane Apartments in 2003, after serving as senior vice president for Village Green Companies, a Midwest apartment developer. Brown also established The Urbane Way, a social media marketing and PR laboratory, where innovative marketing ideas are tested.

Many property management companies have dipped their toes into the social-media waters—some with greater success than others. While many are just another abandoned Facebook page, there inevitably will be some successes.

That raises the question of what to do with these new fans and followers. The organizations that will have the most success have recognized that in order to build a fan and follower base, and to grow your digital footprint, it will include many folks that are not residents. Frankly, most likely will not be residents. Where in the line-item operations budget will talking to fans and followers fall? It likely isn’t resident retention, because they aren’t residents. It is likely not looked upon as leasing leads, because that is a bit challenging to prove out the whole word-of-mouth marketing piece. Will this be a flash in the pan that gets “pushed down to the site” to deal with because they already have way to many others things to do, like collect rent and lease apartments?

Apartment marketers fooling around with Facebook, Twitter and blogs, all in the quest of creating their own branded media, need to think about the overall value of their following that they are creating, because, once created, you need to do something with it, such as figuring out how to drive leasing leads.

We believe that there is significant value in your following, and it should be viewed like any other asset in your organization. These “digital assets” need nurturing and taken care of. You need to provide a continuous value, otherwise the fans and followers leave as quickly as they came.

Managed effectively you can garnish not only significant brand exposure, but also leasing leads from your digital assets. Our Facebook page alone drew hundreds of new “likes” and posts over the last 30 days. Think of your digital assets similar to “drive by traffic”, which is sometimes the most overlooked traffic source we all have.

We are just under 3,000 Fans, and while we are working on expanding that number, we are keeping our eye on the interactions numbers. We did a lot of different things in May to help drive engagement. For instance, we set up an iFrame that feeds our apartment availability, which is our highest traffic page on our website, directly into our Facebook page. The prospect can see our availability, the unit pictures from Flickr and any YouTube Videos of the unit we have listed.

Once you build your following, it becomes an ongoing adventure that needs tending; otherwise it dissipates.