Al Smith Social media in local government

Tweeting the by-election

We've been experimenting with a council Twitter account for a while now (since the beginning of December). Initially we've been using it to push out our RSS feeds for News and Jobs, and the RSS feed for CityEye (user submitted events listings).

This service was ticking along with 47 followers (as at 28/01/09) and we were keen to grow our audience and encourage participation. We also wanted to add exclusive content to the feed. To this end the by-election in Fenham (29/01/09) provided an opportunity to have live microblogging of an election.

To monitor activity we settled on the hashtag #FBE09 although we seemed to be the only ones using this. For future events we would publicise the feed further in advance.

We linked to the Statement of Persons Nominated (17 clickthroughs as at 02/02/09) and created a Google Map of polling stations (18 clickthroughs as at 02/02/09). We also tweeted closing times for the polls and announced the results live.

The following day a press release (87 clickthroughs as at 02/02/09) was issued which gained some coverage in the Newcastle Evening Chronicle as well as LGC plus, Sleaford Standard, bdaily, Public Service and Teletext. An article is also planned for LGA first and an interview was given to BBC Radio Newcastle.

The Twitter account now has 69 followers (at 02/02/09).

Technical issues on the evening prevented us from posting a Twitpic of the announcement and we would hope to do this in future. The event also proved a useful trial run ahead of European elections later this year. If we were to cover this I would recommend two council officers to manage the feed. In addition we would add a more conversational tone to the coverage.