My wife and I have been having trouble with our home builder, Meritage Homes, so I’ve been spending some time on their website and social media channels. I was stunned by what I found on their Twitter feed: canned response after response to disaffected home buyers (see the image above).
As an organization, it looks like they Tweet about once or twice a week. Because the frequency of their Tweets is so low, their feed and Twitter handle is dominated by customer complaints. In the image above, there are only customer complaints in the time period from July 20 to July 25th. That is not acceptable. I would also add that they should do more to make their responses to customers feel authentic rather than canned. They do vary the language slightly, but the effect is always the same.
When they do Tweet, on those infrequent occasions, they rarely, if ever, retweet other people’s posts or share non-Meritage Homes information (such as info and articles about homebuilding trends in America). The Twitter feed is what you would expect – inwardly focused and light – like many hospital and health system social media channels. Frankly, a lot of Meritage’s tweets are cute but fairly useless, a point that is validated by the lack of engagement on their Twitter feed. For an organization with 16,000 followers, they get next to no interaction. One thing I like is their regular use of video content in their Tweets. Here are a few examples of the content they share on Twitter:
The lesson is simple: If you’re going to use social media, be sure to use it strategically. What kind of story is your Twitter feed communicating about your organization? What kind of content are you sharing and why? Is your content interesting or does it simply look like marketing – canned, prepackaged information? And finally, look at the levels of engagement on your page. If people aren’t engaging, are you really accomplishing your objectives?
The Healthcare Marketer 
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