Councils on Twitter

Social media analysis of all Councils across the South West

1/1/2012Key Multimedia Ltd

James Hart

Contents

Introduction............................................................................................................................3

Design of Page.........................................................................................................................4

Use of Media, (Photos)............................................................................................................4

Reaching out into the community............................................................................................4Mentions:.........................................................................................................................................5Sentiment:.......................................................................................................................................7Click-throughs:.................................................................................................................................7Discussions:......................................................................................................................................7Reach:..............................................................................................................................................7

Timing is everything................................................................................................................9

Recommendations.................................................................................................................121) Reaching out to the local community..........................................................................................122) It’s all about expression not impression......................................................................................123) Timings.......................................................................................................................................124) Tone of Voice:............................................................................................................................125) Feed the loop.............................................................................................................................13

About KeyMultimedia...........................................................................................................13

Introduction

Many council’s across the country have now taken to using social media platforms in an effort to communicate and engage with their local community. Despite the proliferation of such platforms it’s interesting to see the different methods being used to broadcast the council’s message and engage with local community.

In particular this report shall focus on the effectiveness of all Council’s across the South West and their Twitter pages. The council’s in questions include;

Bath & North East Somerset Council Devon and Cornwall North Somerset Bristol City Council South Gloucestershire Council South Somerset District Council Swindon Council Dorset Council East Dorset District Council Cornwall Council Torbay Council Plymouth Council Exeter Council Bournemouth Council North Devon Council Borough of Poole

One key metric that is omitted from the report is the click-through rate of any links posted on the page. This is an important metric as it helps gauge the success of the tweets.

In measuring the relative success of the council’s Twitter pages I will focus my metrics on the following area.

Design Profile content Enagement Buzz or mentions od council Engagement with the local community.

Design of PageIn terms of page design, which is something that would help set the tone and perhaps the expectation of things to come, a lot of the council’s sites are left wanting. It will be easier to highlight the exceptions to the dull rule here.

Whilst dull, at least the North Somerset team try to be informative with the “Time to start school” image. Timely mini-adverts like this really help in getting your point across.

I was a bit taken aback by Swindon Council paltry efforts on their Twitter page, especially after seeing their website. The homepage of Swindon Council’s homepage is just brilliant. The current Union Jack design really jumps of the page and grabs your attention.

I would like to recommend that Bournemouth Council read the ‘Confessions of an Advertising Man’ by David Ogilvy. He states, and I’m paraphrasing here, that you should never include a picture of business’s building unless you plan on selling it. Bournemouth has a lovely coast line. Why not use it.

Recommendation: Good design will assist people into your brand. By making your Twitter page look exciting it starts to project an image of the type of business/council that you are. There have been any number of eye-tracking studies that show people instinctively move towards image rather than a great walls of text.

Use of Media, (Photos)

Again this is massively underused across all councils. It’s such an easy way to engage with the local community. A simple “send in your photographs of....” Will produce a rich wealth of content that would be shareable.

Notwithstanding some councils have added some photographs, North Somerset, Bournemouth and Exeter. But really all pages are lacking.

Recommendation: I think it would be good to see more photographs of the area. Events, things to do, almost anything of interest to the local community delivered through the medium of photography. Also, it’s worth noting that the human eye will automatically be drawn to images on a webpage. If there is something interesting to look at the eye will normally find it.

Reaching out into the community

The success of any Twitter profile can be measured in terms of the level of engagement with the outside world, i.e. other users. No point talking to yourself after all. As obvious a statement as that sounds, it’s surprising how many Twitter users (large business’s included) are on transmit mode – that is to say one way communication.

The businesses that get it right are those such as Starbucks, Vodafone and the like that actively engage with their customers. .

And I wonder whether this may be part of the problem for most of the councils. If you open the ‘social media’ door too much you need to participate and be broad shouldered enough to cope with negative comments.

Not many businesses, I’m sure, would voluntarily put themselves into a public firing line.

So how do you measure success of a Twitter page for a local council? There are various factors that you could use;

Mentions Retweet’s Click-through Discussions The reach into the community Customer sentiment

Mentions:

“The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about”.

Oscar Wilde

“Mentions” are when a Twitter user mentions your twitter page name within an individual tweet. This could be a criticism, or an individual who trying to enter into a conversation. They can be a useful measure of how engaged a particular population is with your Twitter presence.

Reviewing the numbers doesn’t really make for some interesting reading.

  Tweets Following Followers RT Mentions % share

bathnes 1536 1536 1238 62 87 7%

DevonCC 3054 196 5790 84 39 1%

NorthSomersetC 904 63 1677 54 36 2%

BristolCouncil 1107 1107 3664 77 72 2%

sgloscouncil 567 6 826 3 6 1%

Southsomersetdc 580 26 897 1 2 0%

Swindonnews 165 2 1253 7 5 0%

dorsetforyou 1888 1173 3863 10 19 0%

EastDorsetDC 268 2 1261 1 1 0%

CornwallCouncil 2312 123 3799 77 85 2%

plymouthcc 1938 22 1456 40 23 2%

ExeterCouncil 348 49 1659 13 34 2%

bournemouthbc 3094 172 3614 48 24 1%

ndevoncouncil 4142 1091 2986 51 8 0%

Torbay_Council 1603 683 1750 26 14 1%

BoroughofPoole 737 174 1770 11 10 1%

Bath Council as you can see takes the lion’s share of mentions, shortly followed by Cornwall Council. But the difficulty is in making sense of these numbers. In this particular chart I have made the assumption that if someone is talking about the council they are more than likely to be following them*. In that instance you could estimate the percentage of mentions against total followers.

Analysing the table further you can see that there is no correlation between the size of the followers against the number of mentions. Which simply means that Bath might be working harder create a discussion or that there is more to talk about. There are no obvious answers here.

*Just to clarify that this is an assumption and it is also possible that an individual might not follow a council but still be prepared to talk about them.

Recommendation: It’s simple. Take part in more conversations. Explore news ways in engaging with the local community. Create lists of target groups, i.e businesses, the elderly, young people.

Sentiment: There are various tool available to understand whether a comment is positive or negative. This can provide a useful insight into whether people are happy with the Council or not. I have not included an analysis at this time as I don’t feel the tool available can determine this with any degree of accuracy.

Click-throughs: An obvious way to measure the success particular tweets. It’s reassuring to see that all the councils are url shortening tools. In some instances council’s are tweeting without it. We would recommend that every tweet is shortened. If not, why would you not want to measure the success of your communications?

Discussions: One of the problems that arises with the mass adopting of Twitter, especially by organisations is that they see the media as an extension to their existing communication channels. And so many businesses adopt a one way pushing of messages out to whoever wants to listen.

Out of 15 local councils on Twitter within the South West half enter into discussions with other Twitter users – not great.

Any social media presence will live or die by how much the public face of the organisation is perceived. For an amazing example of a customer service Twitter account, look for @VodafoneUK. They do customer service very well.

Hats off to Bristol; Dorset for you; Cornwall; Exeter; Bournemouth; Torbay and the Borough of Poole council. They have been entering into discussions with the public.

Reach: Unlike many other business Twitter pages, a council page has a pretty well defined target audience. Its purpose is to serve the local community, so by definition they have clearly defined geographic boundaries.

So, with a fairly straight-forward calculation you can assess how far the council is reaching the local community. The following table illustrates the percentage of people using Twitter within the local population of each district. This is rebased against the total number of Twitter users nationally.

Council Twitter Page REACH

Bath & North East Somerset Council https://twitter.com/#!/bathnes 0.84%

Devon and Cornwall https://twitter.com/#!/DevonCC 2.58%

North Somerset https://twitter.com/#!/NorthSomersetC 1.88%

Bristol City Council https://twitter.com/#!/BristolCouncil 1.98%

South Gloucestershire Council https://twitter.com/#!/sgloscouncil 0.73%

South Somerset District Council https://twitter.com/#!/Southsomersetdc 1.35%

Swindon Council https://twitter.com/#!/Swindonnews 2.39%

Dorset Council https://twitter.com/#!/dorsetforyou 1.29%

East Dorset District Council https://twitter.com/#!/EastDorsetDC 3.42%

Cornwall Council https://twitter.com/#!/CornwallCouncil 1.69%

Plymouth Council https://twitter.com/#!/plymouthcc 1.34%

Exeter Council https://twitter.com/#!/ExeterCouncil 3.30%

Bournemouth Council https://twitter.com/#!/bournemouthbc 5.12%

North Devon Council https://twitter.com/#!/ndevoncouncil 7.77%

Torbay Council https://twitter.com/#!/Torbay_Council 3.10%

Borough of Poole https://twitter.com/#!/BoroughofPoole 2.96%

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Councils on Twitter

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Recommendation: Any social media presence is all about driving engagement and interaction. The goal of any social media strategy is to provide the opportunities through the various tools so that people can engage with the council.

So ultimately you are encouraging the local community to;

Contribute to local agenda.  Participate in local issues. Share things.  Visit the site more frequently. You want people to visit more frequently Refer others to council website.

Timing is everything

I’m not sure you can, with a degree of accuracy, determine the best time to sent a tweet. In an ideal world you would send your highly crafted message at a time when everyone is in front of their Twitter feed and ready to respond. But we all know that is not reasonable.

Your audience will be online at all times of the day. So whilst a click through might help determine a time, that they saw your message, it should be only used as a rough guide.

In analysing all of the 24,000 tweets send across all councils one theme comes across loud and clear - 9am to 5pm. The majority of the tweets by the councils are during working hours.

The following graphics illustrates the timing of the tweets sent. From the image you can see the there is a greater concentration of tweet around 10 and 11.00 o’clock. Also, 3pm is popular. It’s interesting to note that there is some tweets being sent in the evenings.

The graphic below shows all the councils tweet timings. And it is clear, with the exception of Bath and Plymouth Council that the majority of Tweets are being distributed during office hours.

Recommendations

The following are five key recommendations for all Councils across the South West. Eurostar based on the data collected in this study.

1) Reaching out to the local community

Within any local community it’s not unreasonable to have a large cross section of society. This diversity obviously brings challenges in terms of engagement. Individuals will have their own needs and aspirations wants a. But that is what marketing is all about. Segmenting and targeting each groups with messages that will hopefully create some spark.

The council’s should try to engage further and deeper into the community through this channel. Talking more; following more; participating more; being more available; especially during non-opening hours would help.

2) It’s all about expression not impression. The click-through metric is a valuable one. It is a precise value in determining the relative popularity of piece of communication. But it is only part of the story. Engagement in the form of RT, reply’s, downloads, comments, feedback all contribute into the soup.

It’s true that these metrics are more difficult to assign a value to but that it not an excuse to run away from them. Engaging more with the community helps.

3) Timings. As alluded to in the previous point, timing is important - the right message sent to the right person at the right time. Social Media exists 24 hours a day. Just take a look on Sunday night and people will be tweeting on all manner of subjects. Now looking through the logs of the tweets for all Councils and you will see a 9 to 5 mentality (with one or two exceptions).

There is a world that exists after 5.00 o’clock. The Councils need to appreciate this and be prepared to resource for it. Take the time to analyse when your followers are online and make sure to cater to that community.

I think for a modern brand it’s important to be seen out of the office so to speak.

4) Tone of Voice: Social Media is not an extension to the normal marketing communications. It requires a change in attitude and this will in turn be reflected in the tone of voice of the communications. Concerns about diluting the brands equity should be adhered to, but not at the expense of turning-off the public.

A much over-used analogy is…think of social media as meeting someone down the pub, club, coffee house, etc. And then consider the manner in which you would converse with them. Would it be formal, informally, chatty, reserved or not at all.

5) Feed the loop. Social Media, like all marketing activity needs constant re-appraisals. Assessing the medium on a regular basis will determine its future success. Social Media and web monitoring tools are important in this endeavour.

About KeyMultimedia

Key Multimedia are at the forefront of Social Media developments in Dorset. With a varied and diverse group of clients from retail to B2B, we help businesses find their Social voice and promote their brands.

Added to this, we include; email marketing; SEO, Analytics, PPC, Social Search, blogging, content marketing and website builds to our core strengths.

Contact Details

James HartAccount ManagerKey Multimedia

e: james.hart@keymultimedia.co.ukt: twitter.com/jameshartkeyt:01305 755609b:www.keymultimedia.co.uk/blog

David says: (14:47:41)couple of typos maybe + I couldn't see names on the screenshot of tweet times

James says: (14:48:24)ah it's pdf insert.  Will change

David says: (14:49:02)wonder if adding a couple of screen shots - e..g the swindon twitter feed just to add an extra little bit of emphasis

James says: (14:49:49)sure

David says: (14:49:51)or maybe an icon for each of the sections you touch on

James says: (14:49:58)okay

David says: (14:50:21)sorry bud  getting carried away now ......

James says: (14:50:42)nooooooooo

David says: (14:50:42)is there a reference to Monitoring / Listening

David says: (14:51:18)just thinking of something esle we could promote as a service

David says: (14:51:42)and finally.........

James says: (14:51:45)There isn't.  Happy to include, just didn't want to get carried away with lots of sections.

James says: (14:51:48)]okay

James says: (14:51:50)okay

David says: (14:52:05)maybe create an instagram for the end recommendations

David says: (14:52:16)seem to be all the range at the mo??

David says: (14:52:29)to accompany it?

David says: (14:52:41)told you I was getting carried away ;0)

James says: (14:54:42)What do you mean by Instagram?

James says: (14:55:11)I thought it was a mobile version of flickr

David says: (14:56:03)just a sec

David says: (14:57:15)ah - meant infographic -

James says: (14:57:32)ah okay

David says: (14:58:28)here's one on wearesocial -

James says: (14:59:13)cool idea.  MIght take me a while to pull it together,  But will have a crack at it