Planning for success

It may sound stupid, but in order to make your social media journey a success you need to have a plan in place.

When I look at some of the housing associations already on Facebook for example, it’s obvious which ones just went into it with a ‘gung ho’ attitude. They hardly post, have very few friends and by doing so are doing more harm to their reputation than good.

So how do you go about formulating a plan for social media?

In order to answer this question, you firstly need to ask yourself what you want to achieve by it and how much effort you can put into it. After all, there’s no point even setting up accounts if you can’t dedicate the time. These questions will define whether your organisation should get on Twitter, Facebook – or both.

Twitter

Twitter is less time consuming and carries the least amount of risk for your organisation. You ‘tweet’ or write brief 140 character messages which are then read by your ‘followers’. They can then either reply to you using the @ sign, or with any luck ‘retweet’ your message to their followers. Hopefully more people will then follow you and the list goes on.

However, we have found that Twitter is not where our customers are. We use Twitter, in the main to interact with other housing associations, housing professionals, key industry figures and journalists. We ‘retweet’ important messages from local authorities, the police, fire service and other charities. We also like to speak to other housing associations and interact with them, sharing ideas and good practice.

I use Twitter on a daily basis, often tweeting 2/3 messages a day, sometimes more. It’s a sociable and helpful world where you will find information and developments in the industry quickly, but you won’t be engaging with many of your customers.

Facebook

Facebook is by far more time consuming and carries the greater amount of risk for your organisation – simply because it’s a no-holds-barred arena for the world to see. You attract people to ‘Like’ your page and become your friend, using your profile to broadcast your ‘status’ which appears in your friends’ news streams.

Your friends are free to write on your profile’s wall – and this is where it gets tricky. Unless you choose to remove your wall (and defeat the whole purpose of Facebook), you can’t moderate comments for approval. I believe you can now insert a list of words to block, but still the risk of having a disgruntled customer/tenant freely posting a complaint for the world to see (including your chief executives and board members!) causes many marketing departments nightmares.

However, we have found that Facebook, unlike Twitter, is where our customers are. They use our profile, in the main, to request repairs, to ask about the status of their repair, to ask questions and to compliment us! We do receive the odd complaint and photos posted online of poor repair work or of unkempt neighbour’s gardens – but it’s how we deal with these that makes Facebook the more successful of the two.

Although I use Facebook to just post one message a day, it is far more labour intensive of the two. You have to keep a watchful eye on it at all times, to be ready to jump in and calm a situation if needs be or to remove a post or a friend before it escalates.

The choice

It’s quite simple – if you have the resources and manpower available – get on Facebook. If you’re scared of the risks it poses, stick to Twitter with a view to getting on Facebook in the future.

If you’ve chosen the Facebook route – you then need to plan a strategy. Write a Social Media Acceptable Usage Policy and agree on some key points your friends must abide by. (Ours is here).

Then appoint your Facebook admin and devise a plan on how to deal with complaints. Where should they go? Who should respond? What timeframe are you setting yourself? Also think about the key messages you want your friends to read, at least one a day – these will be fundamental to your success.

If you’ve chosen to go with Twitter, set up your profile and start following! Build up your friends list and don’t be afraid to say hello. Agree on some key messages you’d like to broadcast each day, and re-tweet anything of interest to your followers. Before too long you’ll be listed with other housing associations/local authorities and your tweets will start being re-tweeted.

Having a plan in place will set you on the path to success in social media – whether you go with Facebook or Twitter. But whichever one you choose you need to make sure that you post at least once a day – there’s nothing worse than an inactive tweeter or Facebook profile!

Tomorrow I’ll talk in depth about how we’ve attracted friends and followers….