5 New Tactics to Transform your Governments Social Media Strategy

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Social media is a crucial way to connect with your population if you are governmental organisation. But why and how should your government successfully use social media?

Why is it important to Develop your Governments Social Media Strategy?

The following are the main reasons why social media is essential for your governmental organisation to progress.

  • Assessing the competition analysing and understanding the successes of fires of your rival government parties.
  • Campaign management in forthcoming elections.
  • Public service responding to questions enquiries and complaints from your followers.
  • Crisis Management – social media allows the government to identify a crisis extremely quickly as it is unfolding and tackle it at the right time before it escalates.
  • Honesty and loyalty – keeping the public engaged and up-to-date in your government policies.

An Example of Social Media Success – Barack Obama

In 2008, Obama made history by becoming the first ever Black President of the United States. This happened at a time when social media wasn’t such a big deal – Twitter had only just started out and there was no such thing as an iPhone.

Yet, four years later, in 2012, when Obama was up against Mitt Romney, social media would either make or break his candidacy. And it made it! According to Dr Pamela Rutledge (Media Psychology Research Centre) Obama logged twice as many Facebook “Likes” and nearly 20 times as many re-tweets as Romney. At the time of writing this article, Obama has 59.6m followers. Follow Obama on Twitter here!

 

Governments Social Media Campaign
Barack Obama on Twitter

 

Things to be Aware of when setting up your Governments Social Media Campaign

Make sure that you are aware of the following important things…

  • Confidential information
  • Password Security and hacking
  • Avoiding defamation
  • International Security Threats
  • Avoiding statements that may antagonise terrorists

Transform your Governments Social Media Strategy

1. Social Media Listening

Social media at listening to governmental organisation is extremely proactive. It will reveal the background conversation to your organisation. Your government should definitely be using social media listening, and this can be done through a two such as radio or hoot suite. What you should be listening out for my include governmental terms, phrases that define markets you serve, names of politicians, professional organisations that you belong to and wider industry keywords.

2. Engagement

After listening out for the key terms to find peoples opinions on your policies, you will then want to engage with your followers. It is important that engagement is positive and does not reveal any confidential information. The kind of conversations that your government what might want to get involved in on social media may include the following

  • Conversations about specific personal professional roles
  • Request for opinions and policy change
  • General questions about your government services, campaigns and policy
  • Responding to complaints and detracting commentary about why service you provide is not useful

3. Social Media Measurement

During your set government social media campaign, it is important to monitor and measure the results. Certain things will need to be recorded, including…

  • Percentage increase in followers and fans
  • Increase of engagement
  • Increase in blog subscribers over a certain period of time

4. Analysis and Information Sharing

Collaboration should occur in order to analyse your social media results. It is needed to be decided who it is appropriate to share this information with. We not talking about exposing sensitive or confidential information here, but rather that the social media tactics that are working well in the online sphere.

5. Review

Review is the final, but possibly the most crucial part to your Governments Social Media strategy. Review what is working well and do more of it. How is the political sphere changing, and do you need to change with it? Will the current tactics continue to work during elections, or will you need to change the strategy?

If you enjoyed this article you might also like to read about quality over quantity on social media

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