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16th July 2019Neighbourhood Watch and Social Media
Ourwatch.org.uk who are the national support body for Neighbourhood Watch provide some good advice with regards to using social media as a communication tool for your Neighbourhood Watch or Community group. Ourwatch have designed a best practice guide to consider. https://www.ourwatch.org.uk/crimes-archive/good-practice-guidelines/
No two Neighbourhood Watch schemes are the same, and no two groups communicate among themselves in the same way. Some groups hold regular face-to-face meetings, others converse almost entirely by email, and some use social media platforms to post messages and share information.
No one way is right or wrong, it depends entirely on what suits the members of your scheme. But if you haven’t ever considered the possibility of using social media to communicate with your group members, it could be worth exploring. Social media is free, convenient, instant, and surprisingly easy to use – most social media platforms are very intuitive and provide clear instructions for setting up pages or groups. It’s up to you whether to make your messages completely public, so that anybody can read them, or only accessible to a select group of people. You can add images or videos, invite comments and start conversations, and connect with other like-minded people and groups if you want to.
As well as providing you with a quick and easy way of communicating among your scheme members, social media offers real-time news and information discovery – a real bonus for spreading the word about things going on in your neighbourhood in a timely fashion.
Having a social media account lets people know that your Neighbourhood Watch scheme is an active and important part of their world. You can be involved as much or as little as you want. You can feel involved by just ‘liking’ a Facebook page and then receive the page updates on your news feed.
The Neighbourhood Network has many groups registered that use social media as a communication tool. One very good example of a best practice group is the Kingwood Neighbourhood Network who use a Facebook Page to communicate their messages. Click here to view their page: https://www.facebook.com/kingswoodnnhull/
Our Watch have developed some advice guides on three of the most popular social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. All of these enable you to communicate online with others, either with a whole group of people or with just one person at a time, but they all operate in slightly different ways.
Facebook – https://www.ourwatch.org.uk/crimes-archive/facebook/
Twitter – https://www.ourwatch.org.uk/crimes-archive/twitter/
WhatsApp – https://www.ourwatch.org.uk/crimes-archive/whatsapp-messenger/
All of these enable you to communicate online with others, either with a whole group of people or with just one person at a time, but they all operate in slightly different ways.