Why Tenant Events Are a Building’s Best Content
On an ordinary day, an office lobby is a quiet room. During a tenant event it is full of people, food, music, and the building at its best, which is exactly what a building’s social account needs to show. Events also come with built-in distribution: tenants tag each other, restaurants share the posts, and property management gets something concrete to point to when it talks about community.
The problem is that most event content is shot on a phone, posted once that night, and forgotten. At the Union Trust Building, a Flemish Gothic office landmark in downtown Pittsburgh, we turned events into a repeatable package instead. Here is how it works.
1. Before the Event
- Announce it. An announcement post and story ahead of time, plus a line in the tenant newsletter. From late 2024, every event at the building ran on the same cycle: announcement, content shoot, recap
- Invite the collaborators. If restaurants or tenant companies are taking part, line up Instagram collab invites before the day, so the recap lands on their feeds too
- Pick the coverage window. You don’t need the whole event, just the peak. A four-hour makers market got two hours of coverage in the middle
- Walk the room. Find the high angle (a mezzanine or balcony), the best light, and where the food and the hosts will be
2. The Coverage Window
Coverage ran one to two hours depending on the event: an hour for a lunchtime harvest party, an hour and a half for an evening Halloween tour or a private chef dinner, two hours for a makers market or a December happy hour. Inside that window, the shot list stays the same:
- The room from above. One wide shot from the mezzanine tells followers how big the event was before they read a word
- The details. Food, drinks, decor, the menu board. These make the best reel openers and story frames
- The people. Candid tenants, hosts, and vendors, with a quick check that people are happy to be on camera
- The moment. The raffle draw, the check presentation, the fundraising total. At the Make-A-Wish fundraiser with BNY Mellon, the recap reel ended on the number: more than $8,000 raised against a $5,000 goal
- The building. The dome, the marquee, the architecture behind the crowd. It is what makes the event look like it could only happen there
3. The Package: Two Reels, Five Stories
Every event came with the same deliverable, so management always knew what to expect and when. The schedule we used for events in 2023:
- During the event: one story, posted live while people are still in the room
- First drop, one to three days later: the first reel and two stories
- Second drop, three to six days later: the second reel and the last two stories
For a Halloween tour on a Wednesday, that meant a live story that evening, the first reel and two stories on Saturday, and the second reel and two stories the following Tuesday. Spreading the package out keeps the event on the feed for a week instead of a night, and gives the second reel room to be a different cut, such as the food, the people, or the building, instead of a repeat.
Event packages sat outside the monthly calendar, so event months didn’t eat into the building’s regular series.
4. Close the Loop
- Put the outcome in the newsletter. The quarterly tenant newsletter we produced for the building recapped each season’s events and their results: Quantum Theatre sold 2,101 tickets for its month-long run in the building’s theatre, and the March 2025 blood drive collected 19 donations, enough to help 57 local lives
- Send people back to social. The winter and spring issues pointed readers to the building’s Instagram and Facebook
- Reuse the recap. This year’s recap reel is next year’s announcement
5. What to Measure
- Views per recap reel. The May 2024 tenant happy hour recap reached 932 Instagram views; the December 2023 happy hour reel, 604
- Story views and replies on the live story and the follow-ups
- Collaborator reach. Whether tenants and restaurants accepted the collab and shared the post
- Attendance at the next event, the conversion the whole cycle is working toward
Mistakes to Avoid
- Posting everything that night. One live story is enough. The rest works harder spread across the week
- Only wide shots. The room from above sets the scene; the details and faces are what people stop for
- Forgetting the tags. Every tenant, restaurant, and partner in the post is a second audience
- Skipping consent. Not everyone wants to be on the building’s feed. Ask, and respect the answer
Frequently Asked Questions
How much content should one tenant event produce?
Our standard package is two reels and five stories from one to two hours of coverage, with the first story posted live and the rest spread over the following week.
How soon should event content be posted?
Post one story live during the event, then split the rest into two drops over the next week. It keeps the event on the feed for days instead of hours.
See how event coverage fit into a full social program for a historic office building.
View Case Study Content Development