I must have said the line ‘more change in the last 12-months than the last 12-years’ dozens of times in the last 12-months. It’s still true.
There are rare chances to assess just how much change. One such opportunity is Ofcom’s Online Nations report which takes a chalk mark and compares it to previous years.
I’ve read it so you don’t have to.
Perhaps more has stayed the same than you may think but there are clear signs of movement around the increase in AI for search.
As a former journo, I’m comforted that news consumption has stayed largely the same.
The top 18 UK social media channels
Why 18? It’s an arbitrary number that allows me to capture BeReal which was top 10 a few years ago and has now dropped out of fashion.
YouTube is still largest. Some things don’t change. YouTube remains the largest UK platform reaching 66.9 per cent of the over 18 population. Facebook & Messenger is again edged into second place.
WhatsApp is huge. WhatsApp is in third place reaching 63.4 per cent of all adults with Instagram reaching more than half of all adults.
Reddit is what? Now the surprises. Reddit has moved up into 5th place growing 88 per cent over the last two years. However, as you go and Google what that platform actually is, the data shows people spend a mere four minutes a day there. Compare that to the 51 minutes on YouTube and almost three quarters of an hour that’s thin gruel.
X keeps falling but not as fast as you may think. Also worth a raised eyebrow is the decline of X. It’s been falling for several years but the surprise is that its only six per cent down year-on-year reaching 27.8 per cent of the UK population.
X rivals have not really taken up the challenge. Bluesky has plateaued atlas than three million users – that’s 3.9 per cent of the UK population. Meta-owned Threads still remains the largest X competitor but their numbers have levelled out at just over five per cent.
Elsewhere…
AI is having an impact on search. While Google is pre-eminent on three billion UK searches AI-powered ChatGPT has emerged as its rival with 252 million searches.
AI search is growing. Almost a third of all search has an AI summary. This includes Google and the AI providers. This wasn’t measured two years ago.
The internet continues to be everywhere but we’re alive to the fact it may not be always positive. We spend on average 4.5 hours a day online in our own time. A third of us think the web is overall good for society.
Almost four in 10 people have seen something upsetting online in the previous month. This includes misinformation, abuse or violent content.
We’re still using the web for news. Overall, 97 per cent of people have visited a news site. The BBC is the largest share with eight in 10 visiting it in the previous month. The Sun is in second place with The Guardian third. We spend 10 minutes a day consuming news online.
WhatsApp is trouncing its messaging rivals. Ninety per cent of people who use the internet use the platform. This is almost double Messenger in second place.
WhatsApp is the most widely used app. Nine in 10 have used the tool beating Facebook into second and Google Maps intio third.
Children are spending time on the internet. A 13-year-old will spend four hours a day. That’s twice as much as an eight-year-old. You can read the full report here.
Here’s a question. If social media is generating more hate and abuse than ever what can public sector comms people do about it?
It’s an issue that goes right to the heart of communicating.
Three quarters of people get news online.
If the public sector can’t navigate these stormy waters safely we are all in trouble.
In this post I’ll go through some tips and strategies that a responsible organisation needs to take into account.
Is online hate a problem?
Yes, it is a problem. A straw poll of members of the Public Sector Comms Headspace Facebook group showed 83 per cent seeing an increase in abuse and racism over the last three months.
This has an impact.
In the last CIPR mental health audit, 91 per cent of members experienced some kind of mental health issue in the previous 12-months. Opening up a laptop and seeing hate may have been a factor for some of those.
Not post? Anecdotally, I’m also hearing of organisations not posting about certain issues like Black History Month or Pride to avoid the risk of abuse.
While I can sympathise with this, this is allowing people on the margins to dictate what you can and can’t talk about. That can’t be a strategy.
Leave the platform? While I can sympathise with organisations who have left X the aftermath of the Liverpool trophy parade showed the importance of maintaining a presence on the platform. I’ve blogged before how Merseyside Police used X to share updates aimed at undermining far right disinformation. Their tweets were amplified by every major news outlet in the UK drowning out the bad actors. Dial back but don’t check out would be a sensible strategy there.
Time a post? I first came across the idea of posting at certain times of day when I was researching elected members and Twitter as it was then called. ‘Don’t expect sensible debate after 9pm on a Friday,’ one elected member said. That stuck with me. So, if its controversial, posting something mid-morning to side-step some of this. You are also likely to be online to monitor comments.
Have a plan? This is where the Army adage of fail to prepare and prepare to fail comes in.
So what can you do?
Have a plan to combat abuse online
Here are some pointers.
You are obliged to have a plan. The Health and Safety Executive requires that you have a plan to protect staff from violence in the workplace. Abuse is classed as exactly that. Violence in the workplace. You need to have a set of standards for workplace behahiour. This is where the house rules come in.
But don’t tolerate abuse. I have banged on about the need for social media house rules more than anything else. This does two things. What you’ll do for residents with social media and in return setting a standard of behaviour. Have within those house rules that you won’t tolerate abuse, racism, homophobia, anti-semitism and other objectionable ways to behave.
Criticism of policy is fine… listen to it. It’s fine for people not to be very happy with that planning application, those NHS waiting lists, that crime or the coverage of that fire station. This is democracy. Your social media should be the canary in the mine for issues. Every place I’ve ever worked has made three types of decision, broadly. Good decisions, good decisions poorly explained and bad decisions. It’s your job to report back a flavour of that feedback.
But block those who won’t stick to the rules. If you go to your local shop and you abuse members of staff, the company and other shoppers you’d expect to be barred and the police be called if you persist. This should also happen online. Take a screen shot of the offending evidence and make a note of the person who has been blocked and why. They can still contact your organisation through the phone, by post, email and face-to-face. Your staff deserve to be protected.
Get prepared when there’s an issue. Remembrance Sunday, Easter, Christmas, Black History Month, Pride, Hanukkah and other religious festivals can bring the worst offenders out. So, come up with some bullet points on how to handle these comments. Abuse? Block. But there’s also other ways.
Push back to educate . Tell the cynic why you are posting about Black History Month and maybe the important role people with an Afro-Caribbean background have played in your community. Often, other users of your site will thank you. But try and avoid a ‘he said, she said’ running argument.
Switch off comments. On some issues people like the Mayor of London’s office just switch off comments. On those hot topic issues this is a sensible idea.
Don’t say it’s getting to you. All this does is encourage people. I’ve seen some great campaigns while using London Underground to ask people not to abuse staff. Blowing a gasket at a delay at London Euston is totally different to a co-ordinated campaign run by racists.
Should you still be using your corporate X, formerly Twitter? It’s a question I’m often asked so I thought I’d write an analysis.
There are a great many reasons to not use the organisation’s channel. Since the takeoever of Twitter by Elon Musk it has opened back up to some unsavoury characters. A BBC investigation reported that it was now unsafe.
I loved early Twitter but I’ve not used the platform in earnest for 12-months. I grew sick of the algorithm pushing me extremist politics and anyway, the people who had made it a great place had moved on.
As this tweet says, it’s pretty unusable.
The state of Twitter. It’s becoming impossible to even post a local news story without dozens of weird replies about free speech from people in America (or possibly Russia..). It’s almost completely unusable for journalists at this point.
But should you still use it? It depends on your audience.
Your own personal account
There’s two questions to answer with this. Your own account and the corporate account. For your own account, hey, that’s down to you. If you find it a deserted hellscape then don’t use it.
It’s true that for comms people, the discuission has moved more to LinkedIn and Facebook groups.
This is more about the corporate account.
What X is good for
It’s very clear that journalists remain all over the platform. National reporters as well as local ones are still finding stories there and organisations are still connecting with them there.
Indeed, the UK Home Office in the days after the summer 2024 riots have been using their account as a ticker for prosections.
Like this one.
Our teams continue to work around the clock, along with the police, to charge people as quickly as possible and ensure justice is served, following recent public disorder. As of today, we have charged 159 people. See below for real-time updates today ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/kVkuAwwqpL
Indeed, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s video to lay down the law to those found breaking the law has been seen 3.5 million times in three days on the platform. The video went to other channels too.
Both of these channels were responsible for the flow of information from the street and neighbourhood before the events in Southport reached a wider regional and national audience.
But how about the health of the platform as a whole outside an emergency?
One thing I do when I’m conducting a social media review is to calculate the number of dormant accounts on what used to be Twitter. I use a subscriber tool called Fedica. Helpfully, it can give you a breakdown of followers on any account and analyse if their account is active. What is dormant? It means no posts in the past six months.
As a real world experiment, I decided to run the rule over the public sector in the Black Country where I live. Where’s the Black Country? It’s that bit of the West Midlands west of the M5. Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton self-identify as Black Country.
So firstly, I thought I’d run the council accounts through Fedica to analyse them.
Here’s what I found.
Black Country council X, formerly Twitter, accounts active followers v dormant followers
Dudley Council @dudleymbc active 26 per cent dormant 74 per cent.
Sandwell Council @sandwellcouncil 24.4 per cent active dormant 75.6 per cent.
Walsall Council @walsallcouncil active 15.7 per cent dormant 84.3 per cent.
Wolverhampton Council active 26.3 per cent dormant 23.7 per cent.
Source: Fedica.
First reaction? That’s a lot of dormant accounts.
Around 75 per cent of all four council’s X, formerly Twitter followers haven’t been active.
So, for @walsallcouncil, of the 35,000 followers this means just over 5,500 have been active in the last six months.
This makes me reflective as I set-up this account in 2009 when I was working for Walsall Council. I sent the first tweet and battled to convince people to take it seriously.
Scrolling through their timeline I can also see the number of people who have seen the tweet. Around 300 is common rising to around 750 for the more popular content.
But Walsall is not an outlier. The other Black Country councils in the region have a similar number.
But, is this just councils? How about the NHS?
Black Country NHS X, formerly Twitter, accounts active followers v dormant followers
Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust @DudleyGroupNHS active 33 per cent dormant 67 per cent.
Sandwell & West Birmingham NHS Trust active 34.9 per cent dormant 65.1 per cent.
Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust @RWT_NHS active 35.5 per cent dormant 64.4 per cent.
Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust active 30.7 per cent dormant 69.3 per cent.
Source: Fedica.
NHS accounts show around two thirds of accounts are dormant and are all showing similar numbers. That’s fewer than compared to local government.
Perhaps the recent pandemic is the reason for this as health news then came at a premium.
But how about blue light services such as police, ambulance and fire and rescue?
West Midland blue light services X, formerly Twitter, accounts active followers v dormant followers
West Midlands Fire @westmidsfire 22.2 per cent active 77.8 per cent dormant. West Midlands Ambulance Service @OfficialWMAS 25.3 per cent active 74.7 per cent dormant. West Midlands Police @WMPolice 22 per cent active 88 per cent dormant.
Source: Fedica.
The police take the prize. West Midlands Police had the highest dormant numbers with 88 per cent followed by West Midlands Fire and Rescue on 77.8 per cent and West Midlands Ambulance at 74.7 per cent.
Yet while the region’s police have the highest number of dormant accounts a recent tweet about the arrest of a man with what looked like a gun at a riot in Birmingham was seen more than 77,000 times.
#CHARGED | We've charged a man with possessing an offensive weapon during a gathering in Bordesley Green.
We detained a 46-year-old man on suspicion of having a weapon on Monday evening.
The first thing to say is that there are some hugely talented people who work in the public sector in the Black Country. I’ve worked with several.
Indeed, I’m sure those comms people are not relying on X, formerly Twitter, to get their message out and I’m pretty sure they’re alive to the issue of falling users on Musk’s platform.
The recent riots sheds light on what to use in an emergency. Big numbers can still be reached when information is at a premium.
There’s talk about Twitter alternatives such as Blue Sky, Mastodon and Threads. None of them have the reach of Twitter at its peak. Of those, Threads Meta’s Twitter alternative is the strongest horse to back but some distance away from being a full Twitter equivalent in the UK.
Users on Threads are moving upwards but UK users can still be measured in hundreds of thousands.
But for Elon Musk’s platform, it’s striking that the Labour Party’s successful General Election social media constituency strategy was Facebook groups, WhatsApp and Nextdoor. Why? They correctly identified that’s not where the constituents were. Journalists and other MPs, yes. Voters in that constituency? Not really.
People have moved away from what used to be Twitter but haven’t entirely abandoned it. LinkedIn and Facebook groups are there for discussion.
So what to do with it?
If you want to reach journalists and people in an emergency then X is still relevant.
On a routine day-to-day the numbers in these examples don’t support frequent use. To reach residents its WhatsApp, Facebook groups and Nextdoor. To reach journalists its maybe a mix of WhatsApp and X.
Right now in 2024, public sector X, formerly Twitter makes sense as a prime emergency channel rather than a prime daily platform.
This may mean a recalibration of how you use the account rather than abandoning it altogether.
When I was a younger man than I am now I loved mustard.
Our local Sainsbury’s had a choice of four and I would buy them to experiment. After all, what mustard would taste good on a ham sandwich was quite different to a barbeque sausage.
So, when our Sainsbury’s moved to a new site four times as big the mustard choice also expanded. There was now 16 different types of mustard. There wasn’t just one type of Dijon mustard. There was four. And English, spicy beer mustard and three types of American burger mustard.
Choice now paralysed me and the first time I went I left without buying any.
What I’d come across in this is something academics call ‘choice overload bias’. This means that when there is too much choice your satisfaction can actually decrease. We are tormented by the fact we may be buying the wrong thing.
Communicators who are looking to reach a local audience are faced with choice overload bias on a regular basis. What channel to use when there are so many?
When I started my career in local government the channels were a hard to use website, the local paper, local radio and quarterly residents magazines.
Social media obliterated all that and there are so many more places to get information.
I’ve gone through their 36,000 lines of data for you so you can better navigate the metaphorical supermarket shelves.
Key findings
Local newspapers are in an existential crisis. This time they really mean it. Print weekly paper readership across the UK has dropped 19 per cent in 12-months. Regional dailies have dropped 15 per cent in the same period.
Not only that, but there has been a loss of 271 titles between 2005 and 2022.
We already have news deserts. There are boroughs in London without a newspaper circulating and the same can be found in other parts of the country.
We don’t want to pay for local journalism. Not only do we not want to pay we don’t want to pay for ads. Digital or otherwise. Ad revenue is pouring out of the hole in the newspaper’s bucket.
There are experiments with local news. A spate of email-first news services that cover cities have taken off but all attempts at building a new form of journalism over the past 20 years has struggled. There are hyperlocal independent sites across the UK.
Struggling journalism is bad for democracy. The Government’s Cairncross review into local journalism and other academic research all point to this. There is a link between voter turnout and newspaper circulation.
Yet, the demand local news as an entity is surprisngly strong. Be that local politics, events, weather, sport or traffic, weather and travel we want to know about it. All of us. Not just the over 50s.
Local news and current affairs is surprisingly of interest. Almost half – 49 per cent – of 16 to 24-year-olds are interested in local news in their area. I know. I’m shocked as you are. This rises to 73 per cent of over 55-year-olds. This may be the roads that are being built, the cuts to the leisure centre or the event in the park.
But local campaigns not so much. One in five 16 to 24s is interested in a campaign on somethinmg like crime rising to a quarter of 55 to 64-year-olds.
And yes please to weather. Maybe its because we’re British but the category of local weather updates was the most popular with people. Six out of ten of younger demographics were interested rising to 80 per cent of over 65s.
But how we’re accessing this local news has splintered more than I could have imagined. If its not local newspapers then what?
This is where this handy illustration comes in.
I think of it as a dartboard with your street at the centre radiating out to your neighbourhood, city, town, village then your county then your nation.
In your street, it’s WhatsApp and Nextdoor you plug into then as you go wider its social media, newspaper’s social media and then as you approach the region and country its TV and radio too.
I like how they’ve made this visual.
In your street or neighbourhood, WhatsApp and the neighbourhood site Nextdoor are important. As you move towards the town or village and up through the country to the region or country then other platforms become important.
We often forget about TV and radio. There are 39 BBC stations and 250 commercial radio stations and in Wales the Welsh language S4C station plays an important regional role. But broadcasting only comes into play on stories that will reach broad audiences on the edge of the dartboard.
Local news is being consumed by social media with local groups like Facebook community groups now the biggest single place. The secret to good data, I find, is that it can challenge your own experience. I’ve been an advocate for Facebook groups for a long time but even I’m surprised to see that nationally it is now in pole position for local news.
The BBC. I often say in training that making friends with your BBC local democracy reporter (LDR) is essential. They are a trusted channel and that single LDR can shape content for multiple outlets.
Delve deeper and you’ll find newspaper’s digital footprint is important. The data shows 17 per cent for websites and apps of news outlets. Confusingly, it adds 9 per cent to other nmews websites such as Reach plc’s Birmingham Live. Reach fill prettty much all the top 10 for web pages with the highest audience.
People have left print for the web but sill trust local journalism.
Younger people consume through social media. The stat given is 16 to 34s are consuming news twioce as much on the socials compared to adults aged 55 and above.
Podcasts locally? Nah. Podcasts have enjoyed a boom in the 2024 General Election coverage but with five per cent using them for local news this isn’t a factor locally just yet.
While it breaks down into age demographics it also breaks down if you drill deep enough into regional differences. So, if you’re Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, West Midlands, South West, London or wherever a bit of time spent to refine the data would be time well spent.
A word of warning.
There is a top level summary of 56-pages and the data sets of 36,000 lines you can plough through.
When you break it down
I’ve selected one of the many data tables to include in its entirity. As you’ll see, there are some surprises.
Q: What sources do you get your local news from? By percentage (source: Ofcom)
Channel
16-24
25-34
35-44
45-54
55-64
65+
Social media (FB, Insta, X)
63
63
59
56
44
36
TV
29
43
50
54
64
69
Word of mouth
45
46
41
49
54
59
Radio
27
32
32
34
32
29
Print newspapers
17
15
17
20
24
32
Newspaper websites & apps
14
19
23
21
26
23
Messaging or neighbourhood apps (WhatsApp & Nextdoor
14
19
23
21
26
23
Email newsletters
15
22
16
18
20
18
Local news websites
22
22
23
19
20
18
Search engines
34
37
39
31
29
24
Conclusion
I thought the local news landscape was fractured but I had no idea it was as fractured as this. Of all of iot, I love the dartboard graphic that shows how local news can feel very different depending on your perspective.
So, if its your street or neighbourhood its one thing – WhatsApp or Nextdoor – but as you move out its social media then TV and radio.
Given that there is this change none of us can take things for granted.
Have you noticed? There’s some campaigns that lights the blue touch paper with some people.
During Pride events supported by fire, NHS, council or any organisation there’s often a minority of trolls.
‘Why are you doing X’, they’ll ask. ‘It’s a waste of money, it’s the Metropolitan elite, it’s the wokerati and you can’t say anything nowadays.’
But, let’s be honest, its not just the rainbow event is it? There’s a shortlist that triggers the easily triggered events that can include Christmas, International Women’s Day, Eid, Ramadan, Easter and any religious holiday.
If anything doesn’t look exactly how they look then it’s a problem.
The decision for a public sector comms person is quite tricky. Do you post about it or don’t you? I’ve heard of people actively not posting because they’re so worried at the response.
I understand that but I don’t agree with it.
So, what do you do?
Well, the first thing is to get a set of social media house rules. I’ve blogged about this before and it’s good to see these becoming more mainstream.
However, there is something else you can do. Think of it as a planned response list.
Basically, this list brings together all the things you can say in response to explain what you are doing. But the important thing is to get your broad response signed off so you know where you stand and you’re not
Forward planning for the win
West Midlands Police plan ahead on their socials. They’ve been doing this this since the English Defence League’s first trip to Birmingham. Then the extremist group sewed misinformation about a knife attack by a gang of Muslims on a white teenager. It never happened but the fall out raised tension.
So, next time the far right protestors came there was an officer armed with Twitter in Gold Control seeking and destroying the information. It worked effectively and became part of their regular response.
The result was, a duty press officer could shoot down rumours in real time without having to go through the lengthy process of getting each tweet signed off.
Royal British Legion have been excellent about this in the past. Poppy Day can bring out the bigots with evergreen disinformation around poppies being banned. They plan ahead and take a careful look at the comments on their channels.
Often, I find that the Police are the most on the front foot of all against trolls. NHS people are the most reticent.
Timing when you make the post
Help is at hand. The answer is to plan ahead.
When the Pope came to Coventry about a decade ago the council posted the news late on Friday. When they returned on Monday morning war had broken out over the weekend between the factions of people.
Nick from Leeds City Council has spoken about posting at 7am. Thinking about it, there’ll be a moderator around for the first few hours. People will be sober, too.
Leaving it to a passer–by
Leaving it for a member of the public to step into has worked in the past.
However, sometimes there just isn’t a member of the public around who can be like the Green Cross Code Man and save the day.
This should be a bonus rather than your whole strategy.
Draw up your own list of lines to take
If you are looking to post a campaign on a topic that may spark a needlessly unpleasant reaction here’s an approach to take.
Ask yourself these questions ahead of time:
Have you done this in the past?
If you have, what comments have been said about this in the past and what did you learn?
Has an event like this been done by others and what did they say in response?
If you haven’t, what’s the worst level that people can potentially stoop to and what would we say and do?
What tone do you want to set?
What key points do you want to make?
Do you need to make some assets in advance?
If you have a set of social media house rules, under that, what comments do you allow and what don’t you allow? And where’s the line that if crossed you can start blocking people?
Once you ask yourself these questions you can start to build a list of responses that acts as your armoury ahead of the event.
In particular, deciding the tone in advance is useful. It gives you the confidence to operate on the day. Inevitably, comments like these can land outside office hours or when senior people aren’t around.
Do all this and you can better navigate choppy waters.
Sitting in the UK, I’m trying hard to be bothered about the story about TikTok being sold but some people who should know better really are.
If you’ve missed it, the US Government have passed a motion to demand TikTok’s owners sell the platform together with its algorithm. Give the relatively short time 10-month proposed timeframe, this would see any sale as cut price.
The alternative is for TikTok to stop being available in the US. Given the US remains the largest economy in the world this is significant news for the company.
Why could TikTok be sold?
There’s a couple of reasons why TikTok have found themselves in this position. Some have speculated that it could be because campaigners skillfully used TikTok to embarrass Trump by grabbing event tickets to sell out rallies and then not going, meaning Trump was met with an audience of empty chairs.
Certainly, the Republican rebukes to TikTok have made the platform a Democrat platform rather than a Republican one and as a result its become a political football.
The other reason is that TikTok is seen as a Chinese company and at a time when the world is pulling up the drawbridge to the idea of the global village this makes sense.
But what about the UK?
If TikTok gets banned in the US it gets banned in the US. It won’t be banned in the UK. This will hit UK companies who are using the platform to sell to the States. But for the public sector who want to talk to residents to tell them about places to go, recycling messages and pothole news this really doesn’t matter a hill of beans.
However, what may be a side effect is that those people who don’t like or understand TikTok will feel vindicated in their views.
But those people aren’t the audience for TikTok. But there‘s 23 million people in the UK who are.
Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons Seattle Municipal Archives, CC BY 2.0
There’s been talk of a Twitter replacement for so long now it feels like an over-spun line from a tired parent.
Just keep waiting, it’ll soon be here. Not long now.
From just round the next corner, it feels as though it’s finally here.
First, Twitter put a cap on the amount of content people could see and announced plans to put the useful Tweetdeck tool behind a paywall.
Second, Meta announced their long awaited Twitter rival they’re calling Threads.
Surely, Threads is the answer, right?
If you’re hoping for this as an outcome, it won’t. But it won’t be good news for Twitter.
Here’s why.
What Threads will be
News is sketchy but the low down has been that will look a lot like Twitter, or should I say, old Twitter, and it’ll be linked to Instagram.
It’ll also be free, Meta say, and there will be no limit on posts that can be read. Because it hooks into an existing channel there’s no need to start on the bottom rung with zero followers. That’s going to be a powerful incentive to organisations that have spent time building an existing following.
In addition, the benefit of this is that people can escape the undiluted craziness of the Elon Musk era with a platform that’s not safe to use, is rolling back on safety measures and in short has become something of a weird pub fight.
The tempting thing is to hope that Threads will be an easy like-for-like swap. All of your Twitter followers will magically reappear on Instagram. Bingo. I don’t think that’s going to happen.
It didn’t happen with Mastodon, TruthSocial or BlueSky. Even with the advantage of being connected to Instagram I don’t think it’ll happen here to the same extent. It replicates an existing network rather than builds a whole new one.
For the UK, this means that the prime Threads via Instagram audience is potentially under 30.
Ofcom data shows 91 per cent of 13 to 24-year-olds use Instagram and 82 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds. Almost two thirds of 35 to 44-year-olds use the platform, too.
Every single age demographic has Instagram used more than Twitter in all age groups except over 65s.
On the face of it, it’s a smart move to relocate those text-based messages to the ‘Gram. But hold on a second. Go and look at your Instagram insights. That’s your actual audience.
In practice, if you look at your corporate Instagram insights you may see a different group of people staring back at you. What that won’t be is a reflection of the whole of the audience that you’re looking to serve.
An aside on the changing nature of Twitter
Here’s one unscientific example of the changing nature of Twitter from my own experience. In 2009, England played Australia in the 1st Test of the Ashes. Their last two batsmen Jimmy Anderson and Monty Panesar had to survive 88 balls to scrape a draw at Cardiff. I followed the bulk of that on Twitter from the passenger seat of the family car with my wife driving and five-year-old son in the back.
Following on Twitter meant I could see every ball, the joy of the English reaction and the despair from Down Under.
On Sunday, I also followed an Ashes Test. This time I did it on the BBC Sport app without thinking the decision through. Why? Because that was the place I headed too without thinking knowing it would give me the best experience. It was only on reflection that it wasn’t Twitter.
Everyone who has loved Twitter on any level will have a different experience.
What the demise of Twitter and the launch of Threads means for emergencies
There’s no doubt Twitter has been a powerful tool to use in an emergency.
When an incident happened, people headed to Twitter and saw the relevant organisation providing real time updates.
In truth, posting to Twitter in an emergency was the last important reason for having a public sector Twitter account. With the limit on tweets and the stripping of blue ticks from organisations that last reason has been eroded.
Will Threads be a route to communicate in an emergency? Maybe. But I don’t think it’s a like-for-like and it shouldn’t be the only route.
How to communicate in an emergency post-Twitter
The route to communicate in an emergency is already with us. There is already a complex ecosystem of platforms, tools and channels. In the UK, as a population we tend to use five or six platforms. And there’s email.
For me the communicating in an emergency is creating sharable date-stamped content on a range of different platforms. Why date-stamped? Because the algorithms may not show the update for several days by which time the incident has moved on. Showing that the update is 10am on June 3 2023 builds in obsolescence.
The answer may be to post the same message to the corporate Facebook page, a WhatsApp community channel, Threads, email and he website. Yes, this is more work.
What communicating in 2023 is resolutely not is trying to drive traffic to a website. Platforms penalise links. To reach people, you need to put the text of the update onto each platform rather than link back to the website. By all means update your website too. Just don’t think that people will navigate to it from Facebook, Twitter or Threads for that matter.
Can you invest time in building an email list for people in an area prone to flooding? Of course you can but it’ll take time. Email is an important channel.
Journalists and Twitter
Journos have loved Twitter for years. Its influence far outwerighs its audience largely because journalists were there for the breaking news. Not only that but the decision makers could make an announcement in 140 characters without having the fuss of organising a press conference. Or answer questions.
There may be alternative ways to message reporters day-to-day and Threads could be a useful place to point journos to in an emergency.
Twitter won’t disappear overnight
Before Facebook there was MySpace. In 2008, it was the largest show in town and pulling in huge numbers. A series of wrong turns led it into decline. It still exists as a platform but its been a good decade since it was big enough for Ofcom to count it as a channel in the UK.
Twitter will do the same. It’ll decline. It’ll find new direction. It may even have new leadership. History tells us that once decline sets in that’s it. It’s all a question of time.
You absolutely need to make a social media review
What about the other days of the year when you are looking to reach people with a shopping list of tailored messages?
The answer has to be look to run a social media review on yourself to freshen up your position. I’ve blogged about this before. Much social media architecture was developed in 2010. Time has moved on. Those people have left.
Have a fresh look.
The simple Janet and John of a social media review is to look at your audience, your current channels, UK data around who is using what in 2023 and you’ll start to see the patterns emerge.
Bottom line… educate the client
The line I come back to again and again is to educate the client. This is the chief executive, the middle manager, the person you work with to communicate. If you’re having trouble keeping pace spare a thought for them.
This tool will give you astonishingly rich data not just by country but by local authority area, ward and also sub-areas of each ward.
You can use the tool to find age demographics, which of 22 languages is their first language, if they were born in the UK, their national identity, housing, work, education and a pile of other fields, too.
Here’s two key things to look at…
Age demographics
For a social media review, age demographics can be especially useful in building up a picture of how old people are. Use this in conjunction with Ofcom social media data which links age with preferred social media channels. This will give you pointers into which channels people are using. From there, you can tell if you are focusing in the right places.
Nationality and language
Having an idea of nationality and language can help you see if you are talking in the right language to reach people. For example, there’s a big Yemeni community in Dudley who came over in the 1960s. There’s 0.29 per cent who have Arabic as a first language. In Brent, this figure is 3.2 per cent. If you know people’s preferred languages you can better understand if your comms is reaching the right place.
Of course, a conversation with the councils equalities team to understand the best way to reach people would be a next step. But the ONS tool gives you a starting place.
The tool covers England & Wales. It’ll be interesting to see how Scotland and Northern Ireland present their data.
A week or so ago Lucy Salvage wrote a great piece on how she approached benchmarking on social media platforms.
You can read it for yourself here her account of how she looks at her own channels with a magpie eye not getting too distracted at what others are doing.
This makes loads of sense as only your organisation has your shaped demographics.
In this post, I’m going to take a look at RivalIQ’s report on industry metrics. These are literally millions of posts crunched into the data. I don’t for a second think that you should steer away too far from Lucy’s approach. It’s one I really like. However, a different perspective can sometimes shed some extra light in on your patch of the digital allotment.
So, with that in mind here’s some pointers to keep in mind while you are looking at your own channels. They’re private sector.
Facebook
Engagement rates across Facebook for 2023 are at 0.6.
This means that if you have 10,000 likes on your page the average engagement would be 60 per post.
The average post per week is 5.04. However, for media this is 73.5 per week. That’s a real outlier. My own yardstick is that if the content is strong enough then post it. I don’t think looking for posts just to fulfill a quota is a wise thing to do.
Instagram
Engagement rates on Instagram for 2023 are at 0.47 per cent – that’s 30 per cent down compared to last year.
This means that if you have 10,000 likes on your account the average engagement would be 46.9 per post.
Higher education performed the best for engagement with a 2.6 per cent rate. That’s worth knowing if youare after 18 to 21-year-olds. The average posts per week is 4.6.
Reels got twice as much engagement than ordinary video.
Twitter
Engagement rates for Twitter are at 0.035 per cent.
This means that if you have 3.5 interactions for an account with 10,000 followers you are hitting average engagement.
The industry average for tweets is just 3.9. This figure is often greatly exceeded by the public sector which isn’t in the survey. However, media which is the nearest cousin posts 10 times a day on average.
TikTok
Engagement rates for TikTok are 5.6 per cent – that’s comfortably the largest social channel.
This means that if you have 559 interactions for 10,000 followers you’re hitting the average.
Higher education is comfortably the leader here with an astonishing 16.9 per cent engagement rate.
The average TikToks per week is just over 1.5. That’s maybe a reassuring figure. Media at 4.2 clips every seven days is the highest.
You’ve posted your content, but how well is it working? What can you measure and how does that compare? Lucy Salvage takes a look at what numbers to look at.
When we talk about measuring data, KPIs, benchmarks and the like, one thing that can be useful is knowing what other people are doing and how well they are doing it.
Sure, in a lot of cases, particularly in business, competitor analysis is key to formulating an effective marketing strategy. But what about Local Government? In particular social media? I would argue that when it comes to social media engagement, you should only be concerned with numero uno.
“Try telling the Big Boss that!” I hear you cry into your gin – and so the next time your Big Boss wants to know how you are doing on social alongside neighbouring councils, here is your argument for why that’s a bit of a silly question.
It’s a one-horse race
The main reason why it’s more or less impossible to benchmark social engagement against other authorities is simple. We’re not in competition with them. We’re not trying to sell an identical product to the same target market. Thanks to local democracy and the Boundary Commission, you have your territory and they have theirs. Think The Hunger Games but without military rule or a fight to the death, everybody has their own district (or borough). For this reason alone, there is little if any value in regularly spending time analysing what other LAs are doing on social, unless that is they are doing something really spectacular and you want some of that action.
Too many variables
Benchmarking social engagement against other local authorities is tricky because of the many different variables that make up each authority. If we break it down in the simplest of terms, most of it comes down to the diversity of our audiences – not one will be an identical match for another. Here are a few variables that make it hard to compare one authority’s social media engagement with another:
Geography – some are more rural/urban than others and with that comes varying needs and challenges. For example, a densely rural district may have poor broadband coverage resulting in a higher number of residents unable to access the internet compared to a densely populated urban borough with greater coverage.
Age – areas with a higher percentage of an ageing population will have differing service needs to those areas with a more active younger audience. Age will also determine which social platform is the most effective home for your messaging and if you even use social media at all. Ofcom’s Adults Media Use and Attitudes Report (2022) shows that the percentage of people using social media varies considerably by age, as we would expect.
Gender – each social media platform will have a differing split of male versus female followers. In my experience, audiences tend to mirror the national trend of having a higher proportion of female followers on each platform. This will impact how you position content, and therefore the results you get from it.
Regional ethnic diversity – this will impact content as varying needs and traditions within the community are catered for. For example, content produced by the London Borough of Newham, named as the most diverse local authority in England and Wales, will produce different content to that of the least diverse authority, Allerdale District.
Each of these variables means that whilst we might be offering similar services to our publics, the way they are communicated and presented will be very different, rendering it a pretty pointless task to try and make social media engagement comparisons between authorities. I realise, even if your Big Boss does not, that you have far better things to be doing with your time.
How you should be benchmarking your social media engagement
If you’re accessing your social analytics natively (i.e. for free via Twitter, Meta, or LinkedIn) then it’s likely you’re going to be limited in terms of what data you can collect.
If you pay for analytics via your management system, then you’ll have a lot more at your disposal. The key to utilising this data by whichever means is to be sure of your purpose. What will help you improve your content? What do you want to know? For monthly KPI reporting, I’d choose no more than four metrics to focus on. My top four:
Number of followers
Engagement (all)
Engagement rate
Reach
Whilst the number of followers might appear to be somewhat of a vanity metric, it is still nice to see your following increase each month and confirm that actually, you’re doing something right. It’s also the quickest indicator of things going wrong if suddenly a large number of people abandon ship.
There are some metrics that I personally find provide little value. These are:
Brand awareness – just because someone doesn’t @mention you doesn’t mean they aren’t engaging with your content in other ways, and if you’ve ever tried to accurately @mention a company in a post you’ll know it takes FOREVER. Nobody has time for that)
Best time of day to post – this changes all the dang time day by day, week on week. It’s impossible to keep on top of and a waste of time to even try to. Just use your noodle. You know when your audience is most likely to be online.
Impressions – they’re just big numbers that lull you into a false sense of security – always best to choose reach over impressions IMHO.
Sentiment analysis doesn’t get British humour
I include all engagements in my monthly reporting as I don’t trust sentiment analysis. Whilst management systems such as Sprout Social and Hootsuite offer sentiment analysis as part of their higher-tier paid packages, the technology isn’t as reliable as it could be. The last time I checked, artificial intelligence (AI) is yet to get to grips with British humour, particularly sarcasm.
I got fed up with having to manually check sentiment reports which were so far off the mark, that I stopped including them in my monthly reporting long ago. Until AI is better at recognising the context of a comment, then for me anyway, this data is meaningless.
Don’t forget to add the context
What isn’t meaningless is YOU. You hold the power. You know your audiences and how they are likely to react to stuff. You are the one ‘in it’ so you are best placed to read the room when it comes to sentiment. Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of that when drowning in data. Don’t be afraid to include free text analysis of your observations in your reporting. You can give this context to supplement the inclusion of all engagements in your numerical reporting.
Engagement is important
Engagement rate is one of the most valuable metrics as it gives you an overall indication of how you are doing and it’s the best way to benchmark against yourself. Only by regularly collecting data on a monthly basis (or more often if you are mad) will you come to know what an expected good engagement rate for you is. Remember, no one else matters. You are only in competition with yourself.
Setting benchmarks by platform
Here’s how I set social media benchmarks (by platform) for 2023. This was following the collection of a year’s worth of data in 2022:
I used the data over the twelve-month period to calculate averages for each metric (such as reach, engagement, and engagement rate.)
I then used these averages to create my benchmarks for 2023. For example, for LinkedIn I have a benchmark engagement rate of 12 per cent, and for Twitter it’s 4 per cent. This is reflective of the popularity of each of these platforms with my organisation’s audience.
Your bad is someone else’s good
To further reinforce the point that comparing your social media performance to that of others is a mug’s game, a bad engagement rate for you may be exceptionally good for someone else. Another reason why it is crucial you find your own ground when determining what is good and bad social media engagement.
According to our feathered friends at Hootsuite, a good engagement rate is between 1 – 5 per cent. So, if you are punching well above that anyway, happy days! Your challenge now is to maintain that. For those struggling to achieve 1 – 3 per cent, then I would advise that you need to revisit your strategy to try and get to the bottom of why your content isn’t landing. This is the point where looking at what your neighbours are doing may come in helpful.
Hootsuite lists six engagement rate formulas (oh look, another variable!). The one I use is ‘engagement rate by posts’. This will tell you the rate at which followers are engaging with your content, however, it won’t take into account anything that goes viral given that reach is not considered. Here is the magic formula you need for the engagement rate by posts calculation:
No. of engagements / no. of followers * 100
This blog from Hootsuite lists some other engagement rate types, such as by reach, by impressions, and by paid-for, which may work better for you (because only you matter remember!).
You can be flexible with KPIs
Another thing to remember is that you can always tweak your KPIs as you move through the year. It isn’t cheating. It’s not fiddling the books. It’s progress and the best way for you to compete with yourself is by setting realistic and achievable targets that are bespoke to your organisation.
Only then will you be able to accurately report your brilliantness to the Big Boss. It might be dog-eat-dog out there, but you’re always number one when it comes to reporting on social media engagement.
Lucy Salvage MCIPR is Digital Content Creator, Chartered Institute of Environmental Health and previously worked as Media and Communications Officer at Wealden District Council.
