Social Media for Social Housing

Figures have been released today showing that social media websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, have become the most visited websites in the UK reaching around 2.4 billion visits in January 2011 alone.

Here at Housing Jobs, we recognise the importance of social media, including within the social housing industry. We’re talking about an industry where people are its core value, so what better way to communicate than through a social means that is easily accessible to most? Websites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn provide you with the opportunity to interact with your tenants and stakeholders. Here’s some tips we’ve come up with to help you build / improve your social media strategy:

Engage your audience…

For social media platforms to be effective, organisations need their audience to interact with them, otherwise all their content will fall on deaf ears. To do so, you need to understand what your followers, fans and readers want and subsequently learn to how to engage with them.

Create a social media strategy…

To use social media successfully, you need to think about your objectives and your audience. Without knowing these, your social media will fail as the content will be targeted incorrectly, and therefore irrelevant.

Use a blog…

Few people realise that blogs have actually been found to be the most effective form of social media. You can direct traffic from all your social media platforms to your blog, and then onwards to your website. This not only expands your social media presence, but will also help with your search engine optimization (in layman's terms, how high up you rank in search engines such as Google).

Create social media guidelines…

Many organisations worry about the risks with social media, in that any content has a direct effect on the reader, and therefore anything negative written about your company on an employee’s behalf could have serious consequences. It is, therefore, important to create guidelines to prevent this. Social media guru, Todd Defren, has created an example of a Social Media Guidelines Template that you can use for your company…

I hope this is enough to encourage you to develop your social media. For examples of our platforms, please click on the following links…

Twitter

LinkedIn

Facebook

(Please note: our Facebook page is currently under development - a job search application will soon be available which will allow our fans to search Housing Jobs from the Facebook page!)

Good luck!! J