Al Smith Social media in local government

Facebook vs. Twitter

Towards the end of last week I was sent a link to an article in the Local Government Chronicle questioning those councils who favour Twitter over Facebook.

The article was based on a survey by ntl:Telewest Business (which I hadn't received) claiming 40% of councils have Twitter accounts and 22% of councils have official Facebook pages. Whilst these figures may well be accurate it is simplistic and a bit silly to suggest that councils are not using Facebook on this basis.

Facebook does have higher traffic than Twitter in the UK but there is not a straight comparison between the two. Both sites have different uses, pros and cons. Twitter lends itself well to distributing information and news and the ability to automate content via RSS saves officer time. In addition Twitter is more searchable and users can subscribe to Twitter searches, making monitoring easy.

Facebook on the other hand has numerous problems for local authorities to overcome. Whilst the title of LGC's article suggests that councils are not making 'friends' with Facebook users this is in fact the main hurdle. Who wants to be friends with a council? (If we wanted to get pedantic we could also point out that you can only be friends with 'people' on Facebook not organisations.)

The terminology of Facebook forces users to make declarations which may not sit easily with their views. There are essentially two options:

1. Have a council group
2. Have a council page

A group involves people becoming members and joining 'X Council'. A page involves people becoming a fan of 'X Council'. Neither is ideal and leads to low numbers of council 'fans'.

In addition moderation of Facebook groups or pages is time consuming and negative comments can cause reputational damage. Twitter does not have this issue as follower's tweets do not appear on the profile page of '@XCouncil'.

So those are some of the reasons why councils prefer to maintain a Twitter stream over a Facebook page (although many have both). But what wasn't discussed in the article is that councils can engage through Facebook without having an official page.

Councils may use Facebook for services or campaigns, you might not be a fan of 'X Council' but you might be a fan of a library or an art gallery. In addition you can highlight events like Medway's Fuse Festival. So without having to say "I love my council" you may want to tell people how much you love some of the things they do.

So, how about things that the council does that you really don't like?

Well that's an opportunity for engagement too. In the example above a councillor has invited people to come along to full council to hear a motion being discussed. I've blogged before about engaging with issue-based groups on Facebook.

Facebook is just another site. How you use it is up to you. To say that a council is not enagaging if they don't have a fan page is not even half the story. We have a fan page, it doesn't have many fans. We could invest a lot of hours into our Facebook fan page, or we could get better ROI by using Facebook in other ways or in maintaining our Twitter account. As communication professionals we make these choices, please don't suggest that we didn't think them through.

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Update

Here's a link to a Politics Show piece on social media engagement (focussing more on politicians) with a little cameo from me: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/politics_show/regions/north_east_and_cumbria/8271707.stm