Thursday, November 8, 2012 facebook – pointless for councils?
Facebook's darling is fading. Is it time to re-think how we use it as comms people?
Attention council Communications Teams. Nobody wants to be your friend, especially not your residents. Don’t feel unloved – what we do is vital to our organisations – but we need to work smarter.
Digital and social media has been heralded for years as the way forward for comms, and it is. But the world moves fast, and we need to keep up.
Facebook, the original social media darling, is faltering. Share prices are dropping, expansion is stalling, and it’s becoming clear that, while Facebook is a primary tool for social interaction, it’s not the place people go to for local information.
Most councils have a Facebook page, often because they feel they have to. In truth, most of those pages aren’t very good and, in terms of reputation, a bad page is worse than no page at all. Council pages usually consist of new stories, events and, sometimes, information about campaigns. Likes, fans and interaction levels tend to be really low, even on the best pages. Birmingham City Council runs a good page but, as of this morning, only 512 people out of a population of 1,036,900 (0.05%) like it. Birmingham has a youthful population; exactly the sort of people we would expect to want to interact with their council through Facebook, but they don’t.
Even Coventry City Council, the standout stars of local authority Facebook, appears to sometimes struggle to create the conversations, interaction and movement that we want. Facebook is increasingly the digital equivalent of printing 20,000 leaflets, distributing them all over the place and hoping for the best.
So is Facebook a lost cause for us? Maybe not. We need to recognise that people use Facebook for social interaction with people they like. So perhaps we need to find the real characters within our services and communities and let them be our face, rather than having a generic corporate presence. People respond to authentic communication, and who is more authentic than Bill the road sweeper or Claire the teacher? Perhaps using the pages for consultation is the way forward: a single place to have your say on everything the council wants to talk about. By being creative with the way we use Facebook and targeting specific audiences we might be able to create the conversations and movements that we all want, but it will take a lot of effort, time and training.
In the meantime, we can utilise social media in other ways. Twitter is the big channel and is an ideal platform for our kind of information. Hyperlocal websites are leading the way in engaging local audiences. So let’s continue to embrace digital, but let’s do it in the right way. Flickr? Yes. Hyperlocals? Yes. Twitter? Absolutely. But Facebook used as just another comms channel? We might as well knock out a few leaflets and hope for the best.
Julie Waddicor is Senior Communications Officer at Staffordshire County Council
photo credit
Reader Comments (12)
Great thought-provoking post that chimes with my own understanding of the role of FB in the comms mix. No answers but important to start the debate.
Whilst I agree with this in some respects ie corporate accounts, facebook still plays a key role if managed correctly. We introduced a BwD Winter Facebook page where winter updates such as school closures, gritting routes etc are posted on our Facebook page. We have now extended this by creating grit squads of community groups who are given grit to manage and are mobilised into action through facebook. It has taken time to get to this point (2 years) but already we've seen telephone contacts about winter issues fall saving in excess of 15k. The key issue with this is people need to have a reason to like your page. If you can offer them that ie real time info on weather related problems, they will use your site.
Good post. We - of course - love our FB page, but it doesn't work for everything, and at best it's only another comms tool that can reach a certain target audience others can't; it's always going to be part of a mix (although, as all Comms2point0 readers knows digital/soclal media will be an increasingly important part of this mix).
But it does give us feedback that traditional leaflets can't. So we know very quickly after posting whether something's grabbed people's attention (because they'll like or comment on it) - and if something just isn't firing the imagination then we've only wasted a bit of time in posting something rather than lots of time and some hard cash in writing, designing and delivering leaflets.
The real-time info is hugely important too - that's how we attracted most of our fans in the first place (posting up school closure information when it snowed), and think it will carry on being useful for urgent broadcasting (along with Twitter) for some time yet.
And Julie's right about the faces and characters being important. We have lots of smaller FB pages for specific interests and activities, and while they don't have the 23k followers our main page has, they do have loyal fans who appreciate being kept up to date with what's going on. We've just launched a page for our Lord Mayor http://www.facebook.com/coventrylordmayor , so will be aiming for a more personal voice with this. Key to all of this (all of social media, in fact) is to keep trying new stuff and developing what works....
Really good post. I think you hit the nail on the head when you mention that itt's all about using tools in the right way. If we submit a really bland article to a local paper then that's not going to generate interest, we shouldn't expect Facebook to work any differently.
It's also about thinking who your audience is and using the right tools to reach them - GwirVol, who support youth volunteering in Wales use their Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/GwirVol) well to invite responses from young people, which is good to see. People have a genuine chance to contribute and don't feel like they're just part of a marketing strategy.
Nice post. I agree with you about generic council FB page or for any other organisation. An alternative ways to use Facebook for an organisation is twofold
1. people not brands, put your people on social media with official profiles. The FCO have quite a few ambassadors and spokesperson on Twitter and one on Google Plus. I never warmed to brands and organisation asked me in the morning "How is your day going?" I do not get personal with a brand logo.
2. FB pages for a particular campaign one of the more successful FB pages the FCO had was a page to raise awareness about Burma now thankfully heading in the right direction.
The other issue with FB is when you post can you be sure all yor "fans" will actually see e post. You could of course pay FB to get your post seen by more people. All major credit cards are accepted.
Thanks all for taking the time to comment.
I love Julie's post and the way it challenges.
As others have said, Facebook is the natural choice for some customers in some situations. Our pals in Covenry set the benchmark for council use of Facebook, and to this day we struggle to get near their numbers. I really like Fran's line about Facebook's role in emergency broadcasting.
Equally, I like Marc's case study about saving £15k by reducing telephone contacts. There's a lot said about channel shift and forcing people online but that, there, is a genuine example of what I like to call 'natural channel shift'. And with a Willy Wonka-style golden ticket of demonstrable £savings at the end of it. That's going to make even the biggest social media cynic sit up and take notice.
We have known for a while that one size fits all doesn't work and it is even less likley to now we have a huge choice of platforms and channels through which to plot a marcomms path.
By the way Julie, your post has received an absolute stack of page visits today so you absolutely struck a chord one way or the other.
cheers
Darren
I was really taken by Marc's
Some interesting, important and ultimately complex issues here - wish I had more time to comment further just now but I will be back to join the debate!
Really interesting stuff. I wonder if we should maybe make more of the fact that it's not just about getting our message out and relying on people coming to us, but that we perhaps need to get better at finding where our audiences are and communicating with them on these pages.
Joining discussions as well as starting them?
Thanks for the comments everyone, there's some really useful ideas there that I hope we at Staffordshire
can draw on to make our own Facebook presence better. Really happy to
have started such a vigorous conversation!
My only criticism of this blog post is that it assumes that your presence on Facebook is only there for your customers to find you. It misses the value of seeding content and joining existing conversations. Social media in general has never been about the number of likes, friends or followers you have.
Let's say you have a Facebook page and you post something about a diabetes awareness campaign. The only people who will see that link in their timeline are the small number of people who 'like' your page. Their friends will only see it if it's something they're interested in enough to share themselves. This, if used as your only approach to Facebook, limits your potential for engagement.
The key point here is that all social media is about sharing. So, if you were to like and then share that same link on the Diabetes Awareness Ribbon page with its 760,000+ likes and the Diabetes - Sweet and Simple with its 520,000+ likes, you are pretty much guaranteed to get more interaction. This is far from 'the digital equivalent of printing 20,000 leaflets and hoping for the best'.
Now I realise that, at a local level, you may not be interested in the national audience, but the chances are that some of those 1.2m+ people will be from your area. More importantly, they are far more likely to be interested in your campaign and will also be more likely to share that link will their family and friends or on other local diabetes-related Faceboook pages.
Building your Facebook page 'likes' to yield a similar level of response will not only take years, but may also never achieve the same level of targeted engagement.
Also, don't make the mistake of only measuring the level of engagement on Facebook to determine the success of the campaign. It's about generating awareness overall.
So stop worrying about how unloved you appear to be and start showing everyone how much you care about them and what you are doing to help. After all, isn't that what a local council should be doing?
I don't agree that councils shouldn't have FB pages. I think there is space for every organisation on FB they really need to change the way they post. If the content will not be engaging and relevant for the audience you will simply not get followers.