Helping the UK’s largest housing group make sense of social

When organisations are merged, their social channels can be left behind. Purpose, tone and branding are confused. Social consumes disproportionate effort for little impact on the new organisation’s objectives.

Our client was created from several different housing organisations. With an ambitious digital strategy, a prominent media profile and some challenging tenants, their social media activity needed to get up to speed.

We worked with their digital and communications teams to:

  • audit their channels and activity
  • co-produce a social media plan that different teams could buy into
  • recommend those channels that should be developed, stopped or started
  • provide training for more consistent evaluation
  • establish a process for sharing digital skills across different teams

Mergers are always hard for people, so we needed to deliver this work in a consultative, sensitive way. We ran pilot projects to get different teams working together and build contributions to a final plan. We identified success stories as much as we flagged problems. Wherever possible we encouraged people to continue using social to meet their objectives, rather than simple rationalising accounts.

Project Outcomes

  • new social media team was brought together for the first time
  • piloted new approaches to content creation and evaluation
  • provided the senior leadership team with a plan that restored their confidence in social
  • activity was refocused  on the organisation’s goals, including sales, community outreach and customer service

How could we help you?

Talk to us informally about how we approach this kind of work, ballpark budgets and timescales – or just to help you refine your brief: email [email protected]