Social Media Strategies for Housing Agencies  

Social media can be a valuable tool for a housing agency or nonprofit organization. It can provide tools to engage with the public, customers, residents, and serve as a means of advocating for resources from local, state, and federal agencies.  

However, when beginning to create or update a social media strategy it can feel overwhelming. Finding content and lack of engagement can be just some of the challenges. Smaller agencies and organizations may even lack designated staff to manage and monitor social media accounts. But despite potential roadblocks to implementing a social media strategy, the reality is it provides channels to grow brand recognition, build community and resident trust, and expand audiences. 

Here are just a few tips to get started on creating a social media strategy:  

• Find relevant, shareable content: Ideas of items to post include events, office closures or holidays, agency news, videos or photos of events or resident accomplishments, employment opportunities, food distribution information, etc.  
• Stay consistent: use the same social media handle and logo across all accounts to help build brand recognition and awareness. Utilize social media planners, such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, to organize and plan social media content postings daily.  
• Engage your audience with a mix of social posts: it’s important to understand the audiences for each social media platform and post accordingly, ie Facebook vs. Instagram, and curate posts to fit the needs of each. Instagram is much more reliant on visuals and Facebook is more of a networking and communicative platform.  
• Use tools such as Canva, PosterMyWall, Adobe InDesign or Illustrator to create images and graphics to post on social media. This helps increase the likelihood of posts getting shared on social media. 
• Rely on trusted sources to provide supplemental content. Repost or share news from local or state government, community partners and businesses, educational institutions, when information is relevant to your residents or customers.  
• Determine who on staff will handle social media. If your agency is smaller, designate a few people to handle the social media accounts.  

Remember, social media can be an effective medium with which you can communicate with residents, staff and the community. It can help build your agency or organization’s name to an even wider audience and get recognition from elected officials.  

For more information, please watch our NAHRO member webinar on Mission-Driven Social Media. This webinar was previously recorded.