Listen to the podcast episode
Or listen now on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Key Takeaways
Treat social as a discovery engine, not a booking channel: When Conrad pulled millions of visits across client sites, only about 2% of reservations came from social media. It’s almost never the last click — someone finds a property on Instagram, saves it, then searches the brand on Google weeks later and Google gets the credit. Judge social on discovery and awareness, not tracked ROI, or you’ll always be disappointed.
Post consistently or deactivate the page: A client bought a vacation rental company that hadn’t posted in two years, and his first reaction was the right one: if I were a renter, I’d assume they’re out of business. Weekly posting is the bare-minimum C-minus; three to seven times a week is where results start. If you genuinely can’t manage that, kill the page — a dead account does more damage than none.
Your competition on social is entertainment, not other property managers: The feed puts your ’click here and book my property’ post next to ridiculously entertaining short-form video. And no, attention spans aren’t short — people watch Netflix for three hours straight. They just won’t tolerate mediocre content when the next video is one swipe away. Make it about what’s in it for the viewer, not your specials and promotions.
Generic properties don’t break through — exceptional ones do: If you have 20 of the same condo, social can chip out five or ten percent of your traffic, but it will never get exponential reach because the property just isn’t interesting enough to watch. Indoor slides, theme rooms, striking design, before-and-after facelifts — that’s what stops the scroll. The hosts put the same effort into two accounts and one flatlines while the other grows exponentially; the property is the difference.
You’re building on a rented audience: Facebook can reject your ads, lock you out of business manager, or shut the page down with little recourse — Paul spent four months trying to recover an account a client legitimately owns. Organic rules change too: a mid-2010s contest post once reached the entire population of South Carolina organically; that same tactic gets nothing today. Work followers onto your email list, where you own the relationship.
Owner targeting on social is a workaround at best: There is no ’owns a second home in your destination’ category inside Facebook — it flat-out doesn’t exist. Every homeowner-recruitment audience is a creative workaround, which means noise: plenty of people seeing your ad will never own a vacation home. Go in expecting that, or put the budget somewhere with real targeting.
Social works well under specific conditions — check them honestly: It’s not a silver bullet — it’s one of a hundred gold BBs, and it only fires when the rest of the machine backs it up with a strong direct booking site, retargeting, and email. If most of this list isn’t true for you, social lands third or fourth in your stack behind search and email, and that’s okay.
- Time to post consistently, ideally daily, with photo and video
- Properties unique enough to be genuinely watchable
- Reach into your demographic without boosting every post
- Content that humanizes a new brand and builds trust
- A direct booking website ready to convert the visit
You can build a phenomenal rental business with almost no social presence: One client grew from 15 properties to over 200 and $7-8 million a year in gross booking revenue with roughly 200 Facebook fans — the focus went to SEO, paid search, and email instead. Top-performing companies often keep social lightly weighted. Know your business and your properties, then feel free to go against the grain.
What We Cover In This Episode
Conrad and Paul make the case that social media isn’t the right channel for every vacation rental business: the roughly-2%-of-bookings reality, the consistency bar, why properties have to be exceptional to break through, rented-audience risk, and the specific conditions where social genuinely works.
