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Do Self-Storage Facilities Need To Use Social Media?

By Gaige Byerley

ocial media is an intrinsic part of the internet since it became widely available and accepted by the public. It’s in our nature to share aspects of our lives with others, both online and offline. Participating in the creator economy plays an essential role in supporting successful online marketing strategies. Never before has it been easier to attract and connect with your target audience and even get them to act, yet many self-storage facilities are not active on social media despite popular platforms attracting millions of people every month.

It may seem nonsensical to market your facility on social media, because storage is inherently not as flashy and eye catching as other industries. The reality is it’s not about starting the next viral trend, creating controversial content, or entertaining the masses—it’s about connection.

Building A Brand Identity

Social media shapes how customers perceive your brand, often before they ever visit your facility. Just like a clean, professional storefront, polished and consistent online content builds trust and leaves a strong first impression.

On the flip side, sloppy posts or a lack of posts signal neglect and can push potential renters elsewhere. People often check a business’ website and social media before deciding where to store, so presenting thoughtful, authentic content shows you care about your facility and your customers.

In many cases, your social presence is the first step in building trust—don’t let it fall short.

Messaging

Social media gives you direct ways to reach your audience with updates they might not find elsewhere, like facility news, holiday hours, or new vacancies.

It’s also a great place to run flash deals or promotions, which boost engagement and provide insight into what drives rentals. Beyond updates, social platforms let you answer common questions, address misconceptions, and set clear expectations for customers.

This positions your facility as professional, knowledgeable, and committed to providing a great storage experience.

Harnessing Community

Creating a sense of community is arguably the biggest advantage to social media and for building brand loyalty. Working in self-storage, your facility must focus on the community and its members to build trust since they’ll ultimately be entrusting you to safeguard their belongings.

Social media gives you the power to bring your audience together by interacting with your page and content. You can post content that allows your audience to feel your facility understands them by speaking to them about community-specific topics with which they resonate.

Additionally, many social media platforms feature groups where people can post exclusively about one topic or category on one dedicated page. Many local communities create group pages to keep each other connected about the happenings in the community, along with business highlights and recommendations.

This is a massive opportunity to position your facility as a valuable addition to the community and build brand loyalty that larger conglomerates can’t replicate.

Social Signaling

If you have a website, then you need to know about search engine optimization (SEO) and how it can benefit your facility. Simply put, SEO is the practice of improving your website’s visibility on search engines. There are certain SEO techniques you can incorporate on your website from design, user experience, content, and on- and off-page techniques that show search engines your website is a valuable source to searchers looking for solutions relevant to their search terms.

Social media can’t directly impact your website’s search ranking, but it can help indirectly. Search engines use your social media activity as a sign to see if users generally have positive experiences with your company. If there’s a lot of positive engagement (sharing, comments, and liking content) with your social media pages, then search engines will consider this when ranking your website for different search terms.

The reality is it’s not about starting the next viral trend, creating controversial content, or entertaining the masses—it’s about connection.

Multiple Touchpoints

Let’s talk about touchpoints. A touchpoint is basically any interaction between a company and customer that can occur at any point in the customer journey. When thinking about conversion marketing and funnels, touchpoints are crucial to understand because they are the points where someone turns from a curious prospect entering the funnel to a loyal, paying customer. Social media can play a major role in offering several touchpoints for customers in various layers of the marketing funnel.

Some members of your target audience might be in the awareness stage, looking at your content for the first time as they just discovered your facility. Others might be using your social media as a way to verify website claims as they navigate the consideration stage. It can even work for the later loyalty stages where customers share reviews on your page or leave positive feedback on your content for others to read.

Tap Into Social Media

Social media can be intricate and difficult depending how deep you dive, but it doesn’t have to be! There are various opinions and theories about posting on social media. Some say any posting is better than nothing, but recalling earlier points, this can lead to a bit of a haphazard approach that can misrepresent your brand and misdirect customers. Here are some considerations to help guide your overall social media strategy to keep you on track without overwhelming yourself.

Define Your Target Audience

Before you can understand what type of content to post and where it best lives, you must know who you’re trying to reach. Defining your target audience will guide you to finding the best platforms to be active on and the type of content that resonates with that audience. Not only does this save you from aimlessly posting only to show no results, which is quite discouraging after a while, but this helps give you direction.

The biggest issue with social media is the options are endless in the directions you can go, where to post, what to post, and when. Social media is full of many choices; it can quickly become overwhelming when you don’t know the right platforms, what to post, or when the posts should go up. Having a target audience in mind sets guardrails to keep you on a better track instead of navigating in the dark.

Choosing The Right Platform

Facebook – This social media platform is almost a must for self-storage facilities. Facebook has some of the highest monthly traffic, caters to a wide audience type, allows for multiple types of media posting (videos, images, and even long text passages), and has Facebook Groups. Facebook Groups are a goldmine in of themselves, offering facilities a chance to directly interact with members of their community, unlike most other popular platforms.
Instagram – This platform is also beneficial and growing in popularity amongst older audiences, but it’s still mostly dominated by younger audiences because of its focus on high-quality visuals. Unlike Facebook, where posts can be even simple text if desired, Instagram requires images or videos to post. This offers a chance to keep spreading your digital footprint while showing off your facility to your audience.
Google Business Profile – Google Business Profiles (GBPs) are another must for self-storage facilities for multiple reasons, though not always perceived as a traditional social media platform. A professional looking GBP will leave prospective customers with a good first impression, helping build the trust needed to move through the marketing funnel. GBP also has a posting feature where you can regularly post content related to facility features, promotions, and other essential information a user might need answered. Being active on GBP can positively influence your website’s SEO ranking as well, and when done right, it can guide people through the buying process seamlessly!
TikTok – Initially, TikTok wasn’t widely recognized as a reputable source for businesses to spend their time and energy on, but the narrative has shifted as time has progressed. TikTok is a video-only platform that caters to a younger audience. This platform allows you to not only show aspects of your facility to your audience, but it can also let you tap into younger audiences who might need storage, like students, and allow you to age with them over time.
YouTube – Many self-storage owners might not understand the importance of being active on YouTube. It’s not necessarily to build a massive following, though this can happen; it’s more about creating better social signaling for your facility and giving your audience more insights about your facility, what you offer, and how you contribute to the local community. Walkthroughs and facility tours, for example, give key insights to interested prospects about the layout and what to expect before they arrive.

Invest In High-Quality Content

If you’re just starting to post on social media for the first time, it will likely take a while before you fully understand how to create high-quality content. Fortunately, in today’s world, it’s never been easier to create content, especially with the help of professional tools like Canva or Capcut. These tools often have templates that you can repurpose for your facility’s content without needing much prior graphic design knowledge. Additionally, to stay up with high-quality content it’s imperative to plan ahead, because nothing will kill your quality, momentum, and output faster than having to design something every day.

Being authentic is the best way to connect your facility with the local community, because they’ll recognize you speak the same language and share similar ethics and values.

AI Content Creation

In today’s world, you’re also surrounded by AI tools that can seemingly create content in a matter of seconds. It is very tempting to rely on these tools, and they should be utilized, but it’s also just as important to ensure you leave your touch.

AI can be viewed as inauthentic, so despite being a major helping hand, be sure you’re injecting a bit of yourself into the content before it goes out. AI is great for helping get started, ideation, or even rough drafts, but it should not be your sole means of content creation if you want to connect with your audience.

Track Your Performance

For those just getting started, it’s never a bad idea to get into the habit of tracking social media performance. Even just getting used to checking each platform’s analytics on a routine basis is a great way to start tracking performance.

If you want to take it a step further, then setting up spreadsheets that track goals, key performance indicators (KPIs), and other metrics across all platforms in one place can become massively beneficial later in your social media journey.

Tracking performance is essential to know what is and isn’t working within your social media strategy. After enough time, your data will start to show you how to best modify your strategy with proven insights to guide the way.

Success On Social Media

Overall, the best way to be successful on social media is being authentic and consistent. Carrying these two attributes into all your social media efforts will guide you to success, because social media marketing is a marathon. It takes a lot of consistent effort to flesh out what works and does not work for your account since there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to social media marketing.

Social media is all about being consistent, especially when first getting started, because it takes time for your content to start circulating in the algorithm. Platforms value content that has heavy engagement because it shows that users are getting a certain amount of value from it.

By focusing on being consistent, you’ll learn more about how to provide that value which is most often rooted in being authentic. Social media can be a great display for your company to present itself to the world, but if your facility doesn’t match the expectations created online, this can quickly deteriorate your overall brand presence.

Being authentic is the best way to connect your facility with the local community, because they’ll recognize you speak the same language and share similar ethics and values. Don’t wait any longer; start tapping into the power of social media today and start building your online presence to help empower your facility.

Gaige Byerley, a digital marketing associate at West Coast Self-Storage, writes engaging content on self-storage, relocation, decluttering, and everyday living.

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