Internet and Social Networking – Survey Results

Technology is advancing at a rapid rate. Nowadays you can do virtually everything online – speak to friends, pay our bills, be entertained with online music or videos, find a partner, the list is endless!

Housing associations like ourselves are increasingly using social networking sites to communicate with tenants (and tenants themselves are using the internet to communicate with us). We asked Adactus500 members to give us feedback on their use of the internet (and our website), their use of social networking sites and their specific use of Facebook and Twitter.  » Please click here to view the infographics report

What we learned from the results:

•  The age distribution of the members who took part in this consultation was relatively representative of our tenant base as a whole.  Most said they accessed the internet at home, several times a day using a computer (as opposed to through a mobile phone or tablet).

•  Most used the internet to email friends/family and carry out research, either for social (e.g. to look for holidays) or domestic (e.g. comparing utility suppliers) purposes.

•  Half the members had visited our ‘new look’ website in the past few months and around three quarters of these rated its appearance and content highly. Most said they had used our website in the past to find out information or report repairs online.

•  Two thirds said they used Facebook. Twitter was far less popular. Of those who used Facebook, almost half said they accessed this several times a day to catch up with friends. Less than a quarter were aware that Adactus had its own Facebook page and, not surprisingly, less than a tenth had visited this. Awareness and use of our Twitter page was similarly low. Two thirds felt we should use such sites to provide important/local information (rather than them be used for tenants to communicate to us / between themselves).

•  Suggestions of ways to publicize our Facebook and Twitter pages included putting adverts/articles in the tenant newsletter, sending text messages/emails to tenants and having the details of both sites on our letterhead.

» Please click here to view the full survey results

Thank you to all of you who contributed to the survey. We are really interested in your views on this, so please leave us a comment below.