Recent complaints about the Residential Tenancies Board’s (RTB) social media posts are proof that public bodies cannot win.
The Irish Times reported on Monday that the Irish Property Owners Association (IPOA), a representative body for landlords, wrote a letter of complaint to the RTB about social media videos it posted in September.
The videos were part of a social campaign designed to appeal to young people, but the IPOA claimed they portrayed landlords as ‘unscrupulous’ and in an “almost comical or farcical” light.
The tenants’ rights videos each began with a sketch depicting a landlord opening the door to a residence before making a demand of its student residents. The demands were unreasonable, but sadly appear not uncommon among the rental market.
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The students’ saviour then steps out of the background and advises them, and the audience, of their rights. The result was effective and clearly engaging.
The tenancies board said the campaign, with its “light humour”, drove an 83 per cent increase in traffic in comparison to its previous campaigns. The RTB’s two most recent posts on Instagram have a combined 471 views, whereas the first video of this series alone had more than 33,600 views.
Following Tuesday’s article, the landlords’ body called for the videos to be deleted from the RTB’s social media accounts.
It is entirely understandable that landlords, blamed for many failings of public policy around housing and often rightly criticised, would feel the reels “vilify landlords” and call for more “balanced messaging”.
But let’s be real here, the social media posts by the RTB were funny. What is more, they are exactly the type of content which will appeal to students.
The hook of the caricatured landlord will grab the audience’s attention as they doomscroll through Instagram, so that they learn their rights to protect themselves from the few abusive landlords giving the sector a bad name.
Regardless of whether the content will upset interested parties, Cantillon hopes that public bodies exercise some freedom in coming up with genuinely engaging content such as this.
State bodies need to be braver in the style of content they use if they are to engage young people’s notoriously short attention spans.
