Government Social Media
The City Manager's Office of Marketing and Public Relations (OMPR) was established in October 2014 to expand the City's presence and marketing capabilities. It's purpose, to create, launch and implement a brand that is synonymous with innovation, culture, arts and entertainment. The City of Miramar It's Right Here In Miramar brand was introduced to showcase Miramar as a global destination for businesses, residents and visitors to live, work, play and prosper. The objective for this particular Social Media Campaign is to increase community engagement.
Strategy #1: Consistently produce and disseminate quality content with attention-grabbing graphics that is of high interest to the Miramar community. Subsequently, the IRHIM Facebook Page entices users to frequent the page for information, as well as providing for an open medium to engage in dialogue with the City. The page features posts regarding City events and activities, such as, ground breakings, ribbon cuttings, youth sporting events, etc.
Strategy #2: Community Engagement
Launching day: engaged the community through a social media selfie contest during the city's Holiday Lighting event. Attendees were encouraged to first like the IRHIM FB Page, upload a selfie with #HolidayLighting in the comments. Two winners were randomly chosen and received a $100 gift card.
Community Events and Activities: promote City events (MLK Celebration, Relay for Life, Career Fairs, etc.).
The results were outstanding! OMPR received approximately 200 likes within the first couple of hours and have a 5 out of 5 star rating to date!
Launched: December 6, 2014
Total Organic Likes within the first couple of hours: 197, Total Organic Likes within the first week: 216
Total Organic Reach within the first couple of hours: 1,285, Total Organic Reach within the first week: 1,889
Total likes as of 2/13/2015: 303
As of 2/13/2015: 5 out of 5 Star Rating
In February of 2014, a major snowstorm was hurling toward Virginia. With social media being at the fingertips of thousands of citizens, informing and engaging those citizens during the storm was crucial in getting information across to the widest audience. The Office of Communications worked around the clock to post news releases, road reports, and photos. The city's Facebook page received more than 700 new likes over a four-day period and reached hundreds of thousands of people.
This video went viral! We posted a short video of two of our LPD officers dancing at a recent Hispanic festival. The spontaneous dance had an overwhelmingly positive response and again showed that our officers are human beings. Over 2 Milion views on Facebook! Over 26K Likes and Over 29K shares! This was also picked up by local radio stations.
The Dunwoody Police Department using their social media channels to publicize missing persons, especially missing elderly people with dementia or Alzheimer. The department has had great success in recovering these missing persons. However, one case in particular was a huge success. On July 31, 2014, a man with dementia was reported missing from a senior care facility. Initially, they thought he had walked away early that morning. However, after some preliminary investigation, it was found that no one had seen him since the night before. A supervisor quickly put a photo of the missing man on Facebook. Within 8 minutes, the department received a call when a citizen located the missing man over 4 miles away. The citizen had viewed the FB post before he left for work and then saw the missing man as he was driving to work. This was a great success story!
This is a post we made in May of 2014 that went viral! Almost 16MIL reach. The message was a simple one, but one that police officers deal with on a daily basis. Parents, stop making kids afraid of police at an early age. For example parents are often at restaurants and often tell their children "If you don't stop misbehaving or if you don't eat all of your food that officer over there is going to take you to jail!" Small children should not grow up fearing police especially for that type of reasoning. We never expected the post to take off like it did. It did generate a lot of conversations, both agreeing and disagreeing with the message. But, it has been a great example of how quickly a message can reach all points of the globe.
In 2014 we made a concerted effort to use our Facebook page as a primary communications tool. With a commitment to a responsive page that included new content every day we have seen a huge increase in our followers. Our page has tripled in size in just 12 short months. We credit our success to 6 simple tips: Post Often, Spotlight Your Employees, Invite followers to share, celebrate national news and holidays, ALWAYS use a visual and ENGAGE (read, respond and like). I have linked a recent presentation that includes these tips as part of our social media highlight. Our goal with our page is to give government a face. Introduce you to the people that work here and show you their dedication to providing you excellent service. Our social media results are surpassing many of our surrounding cities with larger populations including Tampa and Orlando, FL.
At the 2015 inauguration of the Maui County Council, Hawaii County Mayor Billy Kenoi inspired the audience with his keynote speech about the Hawaiian community values of "shaka, smile and aloha." The Maui County Council's social media staff felt the entertaining and motivating talk which set the tone for the Council's two-year term should be seen by more than just the 300 dignitaries and residents who were in the Council Chamber. The Facebook video has gone viral, reaching more than 100,000 users, with more than 31,000 views and nearly 900 shares, resulting in more followers and exposure for the Maui County Council's account.
Oakland County's Instagram account has seen phenomenal growth and engagement since we shifted our strategy to focus on citizen's content. In the past six months we have doubled our followers and increased citizen engagement by 820%! Previously, we were only posting 1-2 times per week and our content was promotional, branded, and impersonal. As of August 2014 (before we shifted our strategy) we had grown our following to 430 in 2 years and averaged 5 likes per photo. As of September 2014, we shifted our strategy to focus on citizen engagement and we started sharing our citizen's photos at least once a day. We look for beautiful, fun, slice-of life photos that show our citizen's living, working, or playing in Oakland County to share. We find these photos by monitoring our #OaklandCounty hashtag and through various geo-location based searches. Since we started featuring our citizen's content, we've grown to 868 followers and averaging 46 likes per photo.
Now, more citizens are engaged with our account and we've started to build relationships with our followers. Citizen's love when we engage with and feature their photos, so now more people have begun using our hashtag and currently there are over 5,600 posts with #OaklandCounty! It has been so exciting to see our Instagram turn from an ineffective promotional platform into a social place where we can really connect and engage with our citizens. Attached are screenshots from: our account, our most popular photo ever, our engagement analytics, and search results from #OaklandCounty.
Medical Main Street, powered by Oakland County, is a collaboration of world renowned hospitals, universities and healthcare and life science companies in Southeast Michigan. Oakland County Executive, L. Brooks Patterson launched this initiative in 2008 to maximize the growth potential of the healthcare and life science sectors. Oakland County is a major healthcare and life science powerhouse, employing more than 100,000 people - more than the Mayo and Cleveland Clinic combined. Medical Main Street is part of our Emerging Sectors program. Since its inception, social media has played a pivotal role in building the Medical Main Street brand; connecting and building relationships with worldwide medical device, healthcare, and life science professionals around the world in order to attract their businesses to expand or relocate to Oakland County. Each year the Medical Main Street network comes together for their premier event, the INNO-VENTION conference. The INNO-VENTION 2013 conference was focused on how information technology is fueling changes in health care and its impact on the next generation of medical devices. To promote this conference, Oakland County implemented an aggressive 12-week social media campaign across LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Blog. 20 total accounts were used, ranging from Oakland County's official Facebook, to Medical Main Street's Twitter and individuals' LinkedIn profiles. Over 9,300 customized LinkedIn and Twitter Direct Messages were sent to targeted leads; and participation in Healthcare industry LinkedIn Groups reached over 95,000 people. The highly targeted social media campaign helped Medical Main Street sell out the conference, with more than 600 attendees. In order to engage a world-wide audience, Oakland County Livestreamed and Live Tweeted during the conference. More than 900 tweets were sent using the hashtag #INNOVENTION and made 412,000 impressions around the world. Some of the countries reached outside of the United States were: Canada, Ireland, Spain, Finland, Austria, Germany, Turkey, India and the United Arab Emirates. A Social Media Headquarters was set up to promote the Live Tweeting and engage with the conference participants through contests, a large interactive display of the tweets and one-on-one social media consulting.
After the success of the 2013 INNO-VENTION Conference, the Medical Main Street program grew to a regional program to include all of South East Michigan and not just Oakland County. Together, we're creating a global center of innovation in medical research and development, education and commercialization. Social media will continue to play a vital role in Medical Main Street’s success as a branding and attraction tool.
Below is an infographic of the social media successes as well as photos from the Social Media Headquarters at Conference:
The City of Harrisonburg, Virginia has a recorded presence on social media since 2008. The first accounts to be set up were Flickr accounts and Facebook pages were soon to follow as early as 2009 when Facebook first released this feature. Since then, the City's presence has become more organized in a communication effort to keep the community informed and engaged. As of February 2015, the City is up to 12 city departments/programs on Facebook, 7 on Twitter, 3 on Pinterest, 4 on Flickr, 4 on YouTube, 2 on Instagram, 1 on LinkedIn, 2 using blog formats, and then the City also has a citizen engagement platform called Be Heard Harrisonburg. The City's presence is constantly evolving and new ideas emerging. We've been able to adapt to the changing platforms and find ideas for each network, while increasing followers and reach. All city departments using social media make an active effort to post timely and relevant topics while also making sure to respond to any posts or comments from other users, even beyond the regular 8am-5pm office hours! Internally, city departments meet monthly as part of a City Communications Team, as an organized effort to coordinate posts and how to reach residents with the latest city news and events. The City also has a Social Media Policy in an effort to keep how the social media pages are used (styling, goals, voice) as consistent as possible. In a city of about 51,000, with a total following between departments of over 31,000 on Facebook alone, departments are able to reach out to residents that may not have been informed about city alerts, news, events, or other information. Social media has provided a new opportunity to share information to residents, the community, and beyond! The City has achieved outstanding results overall on social media from our reach, engagement, frequent posts, and organized effort. Users often express their gratitude for our posts on social media, and that makes it all a worthwhile effort!
In June of 2014, our Sheriff Dee Anderson hosted the National Sheriffs' Association Annual Conference in Fort Worth, Texas. Sheriff Anderson was the first sheriff to use various social media platforms and especially the hashtag to unite conversation and utilize relevant communication tools. We were able to encourage SM discovery, build excitement for the event and our city, unite conversation among attendees, give news updates, create buzz for exhibit hall vendors and sponsors, recognize award winners instantly and help those unable to attend feel like they were in on the fun. We also provided daily recaps on our Facebook page to help friends, families and our employees stay connected to the conference. The results and experience were a first, especially for a large group (thousands) of professionals who honor tradition. Sheriff Anderson and his staff embraced the future and it was a big hit. The vivid tweets, posts and commendations were measurable and exemplify the power to exploit SM to benefit citizens exponentially.
Per capita, Hamilton, Ohio may have one of the best local government social media team in the world. With a population of 62,258, Hamilton has a staggering 5,900 Likes on Facebook, equal to close to 10% of our population. And this number keeps growing. Granted, a few of these Likes are people residing outside of the city, however the vast majority are local residents who, over the past year and a half, have become accustomed to engaging with the City of Hamilton via social media. Moreover, we have increasingly become more engaged with our Twitter following and we continue to seek out new social media outlets, such as Nextdoor.com, that will further our efforts in community engagement. On July 1, 2013, a creative team of individual implemented a Social Media Engagement Plan for the City of Hamilton. Our Social Media Engagement Plan revolved around our objectives to increase social media awareness and social media engagement, therefore encouraging citizens to become more civically involved. Upon implementation, we witnessed a great deal of success over our 60 day test period at the end of which, the City had a total of 3,401 Likes on Facebook, an increase of almost 15%. This was staggering in comparison to the previous average of about 1% growth per month. On Twitter, our new followers per month increased by more than 250%. Increasing our likes and followers was an avenue for which the City could expand its reach and influence, giving us a broader audience of citizens that we could inform, engage, and encourage to become civically involved. Today, social media has become an important part of how we as a municipality connect with our community. We communicate directly with resident, providing information and working so solve problems and issues quickly, similar to our 311 system. Furthermore, it has become a great marketing tool, as we spread positive stories and photos submitted by our community. As an example, we have a "Photo of The Week Contest" as part of our regular content where we highlight a weekly photo submitted to us from our Facebook community. Furthermore, we engage in conversations on Twitter, actively searching for individuals who tweet about our City and working to create a dialogue. Reaching around 20,000 people a week and engaging roughly 10% of those reached on Facebook alone, Hamilton has committed to furthering our connection to the community through social media by integrating it into our strategic plan. One of the Hamilton's 12 Strategic Plan strategies focuses on empowering neighborhoods to be engaged, safe, and clean. Because we understand that having engaged citizens will make safer, cleaner neighborhoods, our social media team works to create even more engaging, quality content. In fact, we have began incorporating our monthly statistic into our performance evaluation on what we feel is the “holy grail� of Facebook metrics: the ratio of daily engaged users to daily total reach. After analyzing 2 years of past performance, we set a baseline for what we were achieving currently, which was a ration equal to about 10% (equivalent to a C letter grade on our scale). Our goal is to raise this to over 12% within the next year. By creating high quality content and responding quickly to our community, we are confident that we will continue to grow our levels of engagement. Lastly, our social media team has recently launched into a new platform, Nextdoor.com, a private social network for neighborhoods and communities that provides an easy way for neighbors to talk online and engage with each other. We have promoted Nextdoor in conjunction with our 17Strong neighborhood initiative, which defines our 17 neighborhoods and provides a framework and sense of identity to rally individuals, groups, and other organizations to take pride in their particular corner of our city. Currently, we have 12 of 17 of neighborhoods actively represented through Nextdoor within their neighborhoods with the platform taking on a variety of everyday uses from listing items for sale to reporting neighborhood watch issues to finding lost pets. We plan to continue implementing best practices in social media with the goal of further growing our audience and engagement and ensuring all 17 neighborhoods are actively involved with Nextdoor.
The City of Manassas, Virginia is located 30 miles outside of Washington, D.C. and has about 40,000 residents. The City's Facebook kicked off in late 2012. It has grown to more than 2,600 likes. On an average post, we will see a reach of about 1,000 with a share or two and a few comments. On a great post, we will reach about 3,000 people with shares in the teens and 80 to 100 likes. When we first posted the story about Korean dogs rescued from a Korean Meat Farm coming to be adopted, the story went crazy with shares and likes. 554 shares, 372 likes and 88 comments. More than 75,000 people were reached with this post, which is almost double our population. The three dogs sheltered in the City, Kimchi, Thel and Leila, have all been adopted and are on their way to their forever homes. We believe this is more than partially due to the outstanding response we received on Facebook.
Purpose/Objective: The City of Edina's social media presence includes Facebook, Twitter, online civic engagement website, Nextdoor, Youtube and blogs. The objective of our social media presence is to keep residents informed of what's happening in municipal government. A goal was also set by the City Council to increase social media followers by 20 percent between August 2013 and the end of 2015. Target Audience: The City's target audiences on its social media are residents of Edina. Budget: While no predetermined budget exists for social media, some Facebook posts are paid promotions. About $730 was spent on 14 promoted Facebook posts across multiple Facebook pages in 2014. Cost Effectiveness: With Facebook's organic reach continuing to decrease, we believe spending an average of $52 per promoted post to increase a post's reach is cost effective. The promoted posts reached anywhere between 3,000 and 24,000 people. Social media has become a great way for the City to communicate and engage with residents. Determination of Success: While our goal was to increase social media followership by 20 percent by the end of 2015, the majority of pages exceeded that by the end of 2014 (see attached matrix).
Special Factors: Aside from simply reposting press releases and videos produced, the City has begun posting weekly themes, such as #ThrowbackThursday/#TBT and #TransformationTuesday on Facebook and Twitter. These posts often receive higher-than-average engagement. Additionally, through its civic engagement site, www.SpeakUpEdina.org, the City hosted a monthly discussion on various topics, such as liquor laws, food trucks, bee keeping and others. These have helped to increase our followership, engagement and general sense of community.
The City of Austin 's goal on social media platforms is to inform its citizens as effectively and quickly as possible. This entry shows our 30 top-performing tweets from this past year. They vary greatly in topic and how the information is delivered, but all highlight how capably we connect with the citizens of Austin. These top 30 tweets alone generated over 435,000 impressions (meaning over 435,000 twitter users saw the tweets) and over 161,000 engagements (anytime a user "interacts" with a tweet), of which 1,379 were retweets, 610 were favorites, and 1,829 were link clicks. The average engagement rate of these tweets was 3.6%, meaning that 3.6% of the users who saw these tweets interacted with them in some way.
The Washington State Department of Transportation in the national leader amongst state transportation agencies in utilizing social media successfully to reach a wide audience. The agency's Twitter account has nearly 90,000 followers who check in for updates on projects, traffic and other transportation news that is often laced with humor and personality. The agency also utilizes Facebook (with more than 14,500 total page likes) to promote the agency blog, press releases and other news, as well as occasionally as a source of live traffic information. WSDOT is active on Flickr with pictures of various projects, and on YouTube, using video to explain project work and as an educational tool including how to drive through a roundabout. WSDOT's social media presence was especially useful during 2014's deadly mudslide in Oso, WA. People checked in consistently for information about detours and how the work to rebuild and reopen the highway would go.
ADOT has been known as an extremely engaging and (when appropriate) funny department to follow on social media, especially on twitter. You're always in the know around the state, and more than just describing what's going on, they usually show you, too. That was the case at the beginning of the year, when ADOT posted on Facebook and Twitter that "We might have spotted a family of sasquatches on SR 260 near Heber this afternoon." That set off a positive firestorm of publicity, with the national news getting in on it, too. To follow up with the post, they also wrote on the department's blog after having thousands of new followers, to tell the story about what the department is passionate about. AZDOT did amazing work by not only catching the country's eyeballs for a moment in time, but then using it as an educational tool. Bravo.
When cross town high school rivalry football game occurs each fall, there is a trophy awarded to the winner, called the Brazos Boot. The winning team this year was Bryan High School and the team showed up to receive a proclamation from the Mayor at a City Council. We took a photo and tweeted it out during the council meeting of the Brazos Boot. It had 2,760 impressions, 484 engagements for an engagement rate of 17.5% on this one tweet. We have 6400 followers on twitter so approximately 40% of our audience saw this tweet and close to 20% engaged.
In Spring 2014, Wake County predicted, per the Census Bureau Population Division 2013 estimate, that the County would reach one million residents on or around Friday, August 22, 2014. Leading up to the day, the Communications Office developed a communication plan. Part of it was a social media plan for the milestone which included scheduling Facebook posts and tweets that used the hashtag #WakeHitsAMillion. An infographic highlighting resident statistics was used as well as a YouTube video explaining how the date of the millionth resident was predicted. It concluded with a celebration at the regular meeting of the Wake County Board of Commissioners on August 18, 2014, where a birthday cake with the infographic printed was displayed and photos from the event were posted on Instagram. The project was successful because the messages received positive feedback and had a large total reach. Wake County was the 13th most popular subject on Twitter in the area on Friday, August 22, 2014. Between 12:15 p.m. and about 8 p.m. on that day the popularity level was as high as 5th. There were several tweets leading up to the event as well. The 14 tweets posted by Wake County received 37 combined retweets and 16 combined favorites. Eighty tweets contained the hashtag #WakeHitsAMillion. The two Facebook posts on August 22 had a combined reach of 819 people. The Facebook post that shared the population counter received 16 likes, comments and shares and 26 post clicks. Furthermore, the YouTube video that explains how the date of the millionth resident was predicted received 279 views and the four Instagram posts regarding the event received a combined 47 likes.
In order to really get the message across about the importance of seat belt safety, the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) went out of the ordinary and ran a thought-provoking ad on the subject on television during Super Bowl XLVIII. The ad was also posted on social media as well. The feedback was about 50-50. There were many that were appalled by our seeming insensitivity on showing such a stunning commercial knowing families were going to be watching. Others, after some thought, realized that this was meant to spark a conversation, and applauded us for talking about seat belt safety. All in all, it was a great campaign because it got people talking, regardless of what side of the argument they were on, and this in a state where there isn't a primary seat belt law.
In an effort to create a sense of community and make residents excited about our plans for Downtown Coral Springs, we joined the "Frozen" craze and in 6 weeks put together a "Downtown in December" event where we featured Disney's Frozen on large movie screen, provided free hot cocoa and cookies to the audience and had food trucks available as well. Because we were waiting for the legal contracts to get settled with the movie, we didn't start promoting it on social media until Dec. 1, 2014. Our event took place on Dec. 13, 2014. We relied on social media to promote the event and even had a contest on our Instagram page asking people to identify where Olaf was in our City. This got people to engage and built excitement about the event. The event was so successful! We had about 3,000 come to the event and we got great reviews. In addition, in our survey, most said they found out about the event from Facebook. We created an event, which many people shared and made frequent posts promoting the event as well. Attached are our survey results, which were very positive, and you'll also find that almost 50% of those surveyed found out about it thru social media. We also provided a screen shot of our event page. We had more than 600 RSVPs, and have a total of 4,000+ page followers so that's a great response! We also included a sample of our Instagram contest. Overall, we were very happy with the results and we believe our residents were very pleased with the event. And social media was key in making it such a success!
With rainfall reaching 150-200 inches per year in areas of Hawaii, mold can be a serious health concern. After a 4-day downpour over most of the state, we posted this simple "did you know" as a reminder to check for mold and remove it before it spreads. It reached about 8-10x our usual audience, including 23 shares.
Leptospirosis is an ever-present hazard in fresh water, especially in Hawaii. Yet, there is little new research or news on the disease to fill an FB post, so I simply threw in some photos from my last family vacation to Maui and tried to make the copy sound fresh. With 1,171 hits and 18 shares, it worked far beyond my expectations.
The CHP is always searching for new and better ways to engage the public we serve. Using available social media sites seemed like a natural way for the CHP to provide education and information to the public. The citizens we serve are able to share their thoughts and feelings, whether by comment or concern, about CHP operations and allow them to feel connected to our Department. Our goal with this Facebook page is to improve the image of the California Highway Patrol (CHP), build trust with the public, and provide traffic safety education. The Department utilizes the Facebook page to advertise various traffic safety programs geared toward different cultures and different age groups. The CHP page provides a valuable means of engaging communities in public education, emergency or traffic notifications, and crisis communications. The CHP utilizes Facebook's new business platform to manage 47 different Facebook accounts including a headquarters page reaching hundreds of thousands of people a week, eight division level social media accounts, 4 recruitment pages, and 34 local area office pages.
The Clark County Public Health Social Media Oversight Group (SMOG) decided to have a Facebook "Like" contest as a way to increase the number of likes to our page. We created a contest post (attached as a screenshot) on January 14, boosted the post for $20, and pinned it to the top of our face for the duration of the contest, Jan. 14 - Feb. 28. The post offered an employee-sponsored giftcard to a randomly selected person who liked our page or shared a post during thta time. The post reached 7160 people and resulted in a 20 percent increase in the number of likes to our page, from 711 likes on January 14, to 861 likes on Feb. 28. We were very pleased by the results and the relatively minimal effort by our social media team. We will plan to have a similar contest later in the year.
