Housing organisations are always keen to emphasise the number of ways in which tenants can communicate with them, such as web, email, SMS/text and phone, but very few seem to have embraced the power of social media.
By social media, we mean free services such as Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook, which let you ‘broadcast’ your news, questions, and comments to a self-selecting group of interested people.
And don’t be put off by the gossipy and trivial nature of most of the material on Twitter and Facebook. Along with Places For People, Freebridge Community Housing, Testway Housing and CityWest Homes, Housing Technology (we’re @housingtech on Twitter) has been broadcasting on Twitter for the last four months; we’re all using the free service as simply another communications channel to reach our respective audiences, in our case subscribers, in their case tenants.
There will be a more in-depth article on using social media to communicate with tenants in the September issue, but for the moment, why not join Twitter and find out how it can help with your tenant communications?
