Dan Slee

It’s clear that connecting to Facebook groups has become a key string to many comms teams’ bows.

What was once a leap into the unknown has now become par for the course for many people.

But what’s the state of community Facebook groups? With Twitter going wobbly are other platforms fading, too?

I’ve carried out some research.

How many comms and PR teams connect with community Facebook groups?

In an unscientific polls of Public Sector Comms Headspace members I asked the question how many engage and don’t engage.

A bumper 70 per cent DID engage with community Facebook groups. This may be through a mix of corporate or service areas pages. This may be where the Facebook group admins allowed. That’s a healthy number and good to see.

As a counterpoint to that, 22 per cent said they DID NOT engage with community Facebook groups. A further 7 per cent didn’t but were considering how best to engage.

Overall, its clear that he technique has been adopted quite widely.

Community Facebook group use is increasing

With one eye on Twitter, how are community Facebook groups faring? 

The answer is rather nicely thank you. My colleague Elaine – thank you, Elaine – did the hard yards of collecting data from the Braintree area which is the sixth year of us doing this. The results are that use in the community is growing.

According to the data mapped this month, the overall individual Facebook group membership has risen by 47 per cent to a bumper 1.2 million. When you consider that 150,000 people live in Braintree district that means there are eight memberships per head of population. Of course, some of this number may be people who live outside the area but as a yardstick it is compelling.

The number of Facebook groups overall in the Braintree district has dropped by a third to 463. In addition, the number of Facebook pages in Braintree and district has dropped by 13 per cent to 977.    

Conclusion

Yes, Facebook groups in a community remain firmly part of the toolkit.

You need to run a social media review and, reader, I’m here to help you.

I’ve come up with a four-stage process for you to assess the channels you have and the channels you need today. 

What you’ll get if you go through it is: 

• An understanding of where your audience is and where you need to be. 

• An understanding of how your channels are performing.
• An understanding of the gaps, the successes and the things that need to be closed down. 

This is the process developed over the last 12-years when I’m running a review.

Because I’m nice like that I’ve created an infographic on the process for you.

You can download that here.

Why run a social media review?

If the recent events at Twitter teach comms people anything its that the landscape is ever changing and nothing is permanent.

Most public sector channels were set up around 2010. Most have never really been looked at since they were set up. Often I’ll see the busy comms team shovelling out tweets with a link just because someone did it in a certain way. That someone is now long gone but the team have been locked into legacy behaviours that nobody has questioned.

Time is limited and the channels that you have take time. It’s vital that you look at the channels that are most relevant rather than doing something because you’ve always done it. 

If you run a review you’ll be better able to focus on the important channels rather than ones done through habit. 

The important thing here is data.   

There’s a slide I’ve used for years with the words ‘Without data you’re just another person with an opinion.’ It comes from W. Edwards Demming an American engineer and statistician who helped rebuild the Japanese post-war economy.  

If you use data you are better able to make a case and educate your organisation.

Why educate your organisation?

Simply, you need to educate your organisation on the changing landscape to give better advice.

As a comms person, you need the data at your fingertips to give that advice. What worked 10-years ago often doesn’t now. What worked 10-months ago can’t always be relied upon. One of the important tasks is to stay abreast of the data. I’m less bothered about trends without data. Duck egg blue, I’m sure, is marvellous. But if the trend comes without some supporting numbers I’m less likely to pay attention.

Google Plus was a trend. It died because it had no decent data. 

What channels would you look at?

In 2023, the channels to look at in the UK would be Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Nextdoor and LinkedIn.

Step 1: Your audiences

First things, first. 

Let’s look at the audiences you have and to keep it simply I’ll look at four things.

1. Geography

If you’re in the public sector then geography is paramount. Is it UK-wide? Is it regional? Is it in the boundaries of your NHS Trust, council area or the towns, villages and cities covered by your fire and rescue?

From the list of channels, for geography, I’d be looking at Facebook groups across your community. According to research I’ve carried out in Braintree in 2022 there are more than 400 Facebook groups with 1.2 million individual memberships. Yes, these were all mapped and counted.  That equates to eight Facebook group memberships for everyone who lives in Braintree. 

For example, the population of Coggeshall in Essex is 3,900 and the largest Facebook group Coggeshall, Essex has 7,600 members. That’s almost twice the entire population. Of course, not everyone will live in Coggeshall but they’ll all likely have an interest in the village.

These Facebook groups fill the role of the parish pump conversation and the patch reporter who covered an issue by knowing the patch.

Also important for geography is Nextdoor the platform that has more than 10 per cent take-up and which Ofcom says has an audience over 55. 

Geography may also be relevant for Instagram and TikTok with key hashtags or influencers who have an audience for whom geography is relevant. The #barnsleyaccent hashtag on TikTok, for example, is a rich corner of TikTok that celebrates the accent. In Fife, welcometofife has 35,000 followers. Both are part of the landscape.

Geography plays a part in most other channels but Facebook groups and Nextdoor are key.  

2. Business

The business audience also plays a role on social media and it pays to be aware of their reach and influence. Here, LinkedIn comes into its own. Groups are a key part of the platform often unexplored by the public sector. The Shropshire Business LinkedIn group has 4,000 members, for example. A Shropshire Freelancers and Entrepreneurs has 162. Both may be relevant audiences if you need to reach business in the county.

Facebook groups sometimes have a business flavour but less often.  

3. Media

For this, traditional media is surprisingly effective. News people talk about swapping print dollars for digital dimes. The cash-generating small ads, display ads, property and automotive that generated the profits for newspaper groups have largely moved online.

But despite the print decline, audiences have often moved online. In Sunderland, less than 20,000 people see a copy of the Sunderland Echo built more than 70 per cent will see a piece of Sunderland Echo content online. This could be from email, a link forwarded in a community Facebook group, Twitter or most often from a Facebook page. The Manchester Evening News is a classic example with 20,000 print copies and 1.7 million people liking their Facebook page. 

Twitter is also where journalists can be found. 

While some news organisations are experimenting with podcasts, TikTok, Snapchat and other channels Facebook is the driver.

4. Partners

Your partners’ social media is often overlooked. But sharing content at key times of year can amplify a message. Think of the benefit of the public sector getting behind a fire and rescue bonfire night message in late October or flu messaging for the NHS in winter.

5. Your own internal channels 

Internal comms is often the bridesmaid left behind while the popular trend takes all the love and attention. But organisations in the first weeks of pandemic free from IT-shackles often experimented with channels as an internal comms solution. Facebook groups for staff or informal WhatsApp groups proved themselves as lifesaving routes to the organisation’s best advocates. 

6. Minority groups

The broadbrush often captures the big numbers but it does nothing to capture minority communities. ONS data or the council website will often give you a breakdown of minority groups in your area. The council equalities officer may give you a breakdown of the best ways to reach them. The Facebook group Polski Erdington in Birmingham, for example has almost 4,000 members and Hackney Council brilliantly used WhatsApp in the pandemic to reach the observant Jewish community after a conversation with community leaders. 

Your demographic audiences

This is the one that most fascinates me. 

Each demographic group uses technology in a slightly different way. 

Dig around the Ofcom and UKOM websites and you’ll find a mine of available useful data that shows how your audiences are consuming social media and online news. 

The splits are usually 16-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-65 and 65+.

Broadly put, UK under 24s have nine different platforms where at least a fifth of them are using it every month. As you go through the age ranges, over 35s tend to gravitate to Facebook as their primary social platform. 

Using this will give you good idea of where your audiences are online.

From looking at how people are consuming social channels you’ve got a better idea if you are barking up the right tree when you map your own channels as an organisation. As 74 per cent of under 24s are using TikTok, do you want to reach this group? You can start to make sense of where the gaps are. 

Your channel performance

As you’ve looked at how people are consuming media you’ve an idea where the gaps are. In turn you can see when you look at your own channels at where you’ve maybe been left high and dry. Time spent on the corporate MySpace in 2023 needs to be re-allocated.

In 2023, the channels to look at in the UK would be Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Nextdoor and LinkedIn.

Your insights in the backend can be useful for establishing your audience. 

Take a look at the following: 

• Followers or likes.
• When the channel was last updated.   
• Across a seven day period, hope many updates, how many were calls to action, how much engagement there was, messages inwards and how many were replied to.

This will give an idea of how engaging and therefore how successful your channels are.

I issue a green, amber and red rating. Green needs to be celebrated. Amber needs a helping hand and red needs to be either closed down or to face radical surgery. The equalities Twitter that hasn’t tweeted in nine months is causing pure reputational damage, I’d argue. So to is the Facebook page posting repetitive posts with the same content or the Instagram that’s pure call to action. 

I’ve long advocated an 80-20 split between engaging content and call to action. Social media is social. If its not then people feel as though they are being sold to and the channel will fail.

Again, this is where you need to educate the organisation.    

Your report

Your report pulls all this together and gives a list of strategic and tactical recommendations. 

Nobody says this will be straight forward. It takes time but all good things take time. By taking this path you can better allocate time and scarce resources. There is nothing so demoralising as ticking a box and knowing deep down that staying late will make no difference at all other than to your blood pressure.

The communications landscape is a fractured and often changing thing. You need to be on your toes. 

To chat about social media reviews at your organisation drop me a line dan@danslee.co.uk.

There was an excellent Zoom session about saying ‘no’ to requests better.

Cara Martin suggested the topic which became a Zoom session for the Public Sector Comms Headspace.

Saying ‘no’ can range from how to decline a non-comms request to turning down an order for leaflets when the answer patently isn’t.

A few years ago, I crowdsourced examples. It went from daft to seriously daft. A  request to print out the internet was the winner, if I recall. 

But it’s more the sheer volume of work that’s the issue. 

The showing that research says get involved early route

Firstly, here’s some research I was involved with.

It looks at the relationship between comms’ early involvement and success.

In a nutshell, the earlier comms can be involved the greater chance of success.

In training, I include this slide as a way to politely set expectation levels. Come late and you’ve less chance of this being a success. With that in mind, you can do your level best but it won’t be as successful as it could have been. Got anything on the launchpad? Okay, let’s chat about it.

This is fine for last minute requests but how about requests for the wrong thing?

The GCS 2010 route

In 2010, comms was revolutionised by the incoming administration through a basic idea.

The basic idea was no business plan = no comms.

So, if there’s no business plan as to why this needs doing then it woul;dn’t get done and even the most junior of comms officer was empowered to give this reply.

Of course, you need senior leadership buy-in for this.   

The pushing back against drone footage requests by quick comms planning route

I always remember the conversation that went along the lines of someone important demanding drone footage. Why? because Wolverhampton did it. As a reason this is pretty weak.

The comms plan I use has been adapted from a CIPR comms plan. I’ve blogged about this before here. There is a template you can download. Take a look here.

It takes 10 minutes to run through or it can take all day if you want to stretch it out. 

The important thing is you sit down with the person who needs the comms to draw out what they need and who their audience is. 

The senior buy-in route

This is the hardest to achieve but by far the most effective. 

Talk to the chief exec in peacetime. Point out that they’re doing a lot of unimportant stuff when they need to be concentrating on their priorities. Could theory concentrate on the important? You can? Fantastic. Get a list of those priorities. Turn it into a pledge card. Here’s what we’ll do well.

The rest? offer some self-service, maybe but that’s about it.

Good luck.

Accessible content is often overlooked in the race for clicks and attention. It’s the law but it needn’t be daunting. Helen Crumley, a public sector communications and engagement manager, sets out some steps to make it easier.  

by Helen Crumley

I’ve spent the last 12-months helping our organisation make documents, social media posts and web pages accessible. Here’s some key thoughts, suggestions and links to inspire and encourage.

It’s the law 

First things first, the legal requirements around accessibility. It’s the law in order to compel organisations to make what they produce accessible to people who may have a sight or hearing disability. 

In the UK, there are 150,000 British Sign Language users, two million blind or visually impaired people and up to 11 million people who have hearing problems. That’s a big chunk of the population and they need to be able to hear or see what content you are posting about the services they may rely on. 

These apply to web content but provide a great platform to base all your accessibility work on.

Public sector organisations are accountable to the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018. These built upon existing UK anti-discrimination law, like the Equality Act 2010. 

To be compliant you need to make sure you:

• Meet WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.1 Level AA
• Publish an accessibility statement

There were some time frames built into these regulations, all of which have now passed, to allow public sector organisations to remediate, update and amend their sites. Which brings me nicely to my opening subject.

You’ll need time

Rome wasn’t built in a day. The same is true when tackling accessibility. You’re going to need time. You may find some days you move forward and make real breakthroughs. On others you may get people come up and think it’ll be sorted in three months or by the end of the year and the like. Manage expectations.

In my head, I’ve always viewed this work at around three years. Partly because it’s by far not the only thing I do in my role. However what this really boils down to is culture and behaviour change. 

As an example, take headings in Word. Truth time here, do most of you just bold out and slightly increase the font size to make a heading? That’s what I used to do as I had picked up Word from the day I started my first job. So, I had to learn how to re-do something that I had been doing for nearly 20 years and change my behaviour. Now imagine doing that for dozens of steps in Word and PowerPoint, bringing everyone in an organisation with you, against a backdrop of ‘we need it yesterday’.

You’ll get incredibly frustrated, bored of saying ‘alt text is missing’ or ‘does it need to be in a table, or is it in there to look pretty?’, and even angry. The one phrase that sets me off is ‘but it’s just for staff’. I could wax lyrical here but let’s just say being accessible applies to everyone.

You’ll need support, allies and some resources 

Don’t under-estimate the mountain you will be climbing. You can’t do this on your own. As I mention above it includes everyone and so it should involve everyone. Not just the communications team.

Do some outreach internally. You’ll find pockets of passionate teams, or people – target them, bring them into the fold and let them be your loudspeaker so it’s not just you shouting into the wind. 

I call them my Accessibility Allies. Support them, share top tips and host Q&As, a Teams group works well as people can dip in and out. Those little wins, when seeing the light go on as someone gets it is incredibly rewarding. 

This then creates a groundswell of support.

Find external sources of advice too. You’re going to suddenly find yourself being called an accessibility expert! You need to know where to go for those questions you’re not so expert on. 

I highly recommend Alexa Heinrich and her Accessible Social site (for social media accessibility but a lot transfers across to documents and websites) and Dax Castro for his videos on pdf remediation. He can get a bit technical but bear with him. The W3C site is great too, and indeed so are the Microsoft Accessibility support pages.

Finally, but by no means least, ask for help from those you are looking to include. I’ve sought advice from local deaf, blind, and learning disability groups as well as national charities on best practice. They also use the screen readers, such as JAWS (no, not the shark) and NVDA so you can ask them to test your work for you.

You’ll need some budget… but not as much as you think 

Money. You will need some but not necessarily large amounts. Use carrots and sticks to bring senior leadership with you. Starting with the risk of serious fines that impact the bottom line and reputational risk opens doors, but also link to values around openness and inclusion. For me this is the real reason for doing it so more people can access our work, in a way that works for them, and doesn’t exclude anyone.  

Our hard-earned budget went on training, ensuring we got the recordings and transcripts to allow people to learn in a way they prefer. Open it to everyone, but target teams you know produce a lot of content.

We also used it to buy licences for the organisation to allow us (as in the organisation, not just the communications team) to remediate our own documents in Adobe Acrobat. As much as I would love to abolish the pdf that is not in my power. So, I worked within the constraints we had.

You’ll need governance and compliance 

So, we know the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations came into law in 2018. We also know we need our digital platforms to be accessible, but the last couple of years have meant we’ve been pulled away from this.

If I’m honest we are still working through this and it’s the next phase of our work. It was a deliberate tactic to engage our staff, partners, and teams first. We exist after all to help our local population and providing employees with practical tools and techniques to take that first step was prioritised before tackling this area.

Having hearts and minds engaged now means we can step back, breathe, assess and work out where our gaps are. What is left to do to make us fully compliant and exceed the minimum requirements, how regularly do we need to audit, and how are we going to do this.

You’ll need to be open and share to learn 

This isn’t a competition to see who gets to be the best at being accessible and win a trophy. Being open and inclusive with our documents and communication helps everyone understand the work we are trying to communicate.

Within our NHS system I have shared the training, both written and videos, with other NHS organisations, local government and our voluntary partners. I’ve also encouraged them to share further. I’ve spoken in internal team meetings and to senior leaders.

Seek out forums, blogs, webinars – go where people are sharing their knowledge to help you. Post your questions, be there to help if someone new asks a question you know the answer to.

I’ll leave you with this great quote and a challenge. “The accessibility problems of today are the main breakthroughs of tomorrow” If someone works out the technology to create an accessible flow/organisation chart give me a call, it’s a gap in the market!

Helen Crumley is communications and engagement manager at Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Integrated Care System.

Twitter is either going through a death spiral or some temporary turbulence. Liz Halliday looks at making sense of potential long-term Twitter rival Mastodon.

With Twitter rapidly losing trust under the iron whims of its new CEO, many people – and advertisers – are walking away. But where are they going?

The maxim “go where the audience is” guides a lot of our practice as communications and PR professionals so learning where people are heading to is important. The Brandwatch State of Social, October 2022 report talks about fragmenting audiences and the use of smaller social media platforms. 

So now is a critical time to do a social media audit for your organisation and explore where your audiences are preferring to hang out. That way you can advise on where to focus your organisation’s social media resources, and what to do if or when Twitter’s fail whale returns permanently. 

For a project I run in my spare time I ran a poll on Twitter last week. I asked where people were planning to go if they left. Instagram was a clear winner, but over the course of the week I saw Mastodon go from a distant third to beating Facebook into second place. You’ve probably seen Mastodon starting to get headlines as an alternative ( the BBC, Guardian and Telegraph have all provided guides in the last week).

What is Mastodon, and what do you need to know about it?

At first glance Mastodon is confusing and technical. But so was Twitter in 2007. I remember when users created hashtags as a concept, and you had to type “D” before someone’s handle to DM them. (I also remember telling a boss in the 1990s that email might have a future.)

On Mastodon, you join a server and start following people on it. The different servers are federated to form the full network (known as the Fediverse). Friends on other servers can share their name (for example, I’m @magslhalliday@mstdn.social) so you can find and follow them – it’s a bit like swapping email addresses. You can also follow hashtags like #CatsOfMastodon (because of course there are cats). You have three feeds:

• Home are the people and hashtags you follow directly
• Local are posts from people on the samer server as you
• Federated are posts from people on all the servers your server is connected to.

You can learn about getting to grips with Mastodon in Francis Beaudet’s humane guide to Mastodon. There’s also an account called FediTips who explains things like how verification works.

The federation is what makes it a safer experience for users: the server I’m on can and will block entire servers posting lots of hate speech so I’ll never see those posts. Servers are generally run by individuals, who pay the running costs of activity on their server. Many are crowd-funded, and the admins are currently trying to increase stability as the influx of users slows server time – the same scaling up problems Twitter had in the 00s. 

This decentralized model is also what makes it harder for organizations at the moment. There are two reasons to wait and see from an organizational perspective.

What are the comms challenges?

There are no metrics. Since measuring reach and engagement are essential for comms and PR the lack of an analytical dashboard means there’s no proof of value. There’s also no algorithm reward for getting lots of likes, and no ‘trending hashtags’. You also can’t buy space in people’s feeds as there are no ads or sponsorship. It’s unclear if Mastodon will ever introduce metrics. It’s designed to work against users who are chasing #numbers on the grounds that any such chase incentivises toxic behaviour.

No third-party schedulers support posting to Mastodon. Yet. There is a scheduler interface, but you cannot attach images. That makes it difficult to simply switch Twitter content to Mastodon content. My workaround is scheduling text-only posts then using the ‘delete and re-draft’ function to add the images but that is incredibly labour intensive and is not a reasonable ask on social media managers. Rumour has it that Buffer might investigate adding Mastodon as a channel they support.

What is the comms potential?

There are some organisations already exploring how to use Mastodon. The Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information in Germany (BfDI) set up its own server on Mastodon back in April 2022. The only accounts on their server are German government authorities, but anyone can follow any of those accounts. That means any user handle that is @[name]@social.bund.de is, by default, an official German authority account. It also means they do not need to worry about a server folding. The EU also has its own server.

This model could prove valuable for public sector organizations. I can easily imagine a gov.uk server which all national and local government have accounts on. Or a publishing house could host a server for all its authors, or the BBC could host one for all its journalists. Obviously, it puts the costs of running the server onto the organizations, but it also means verification that is not subject to the whims of a man- child. 

What to do now

Mastodon may never be the solution for advertising as it does not care about capitalism. But it could be ready for public sector, media and arts organizations. It’s unlikely to be the whole answer to “what replaces Twitter?” but it has the potential to be a new tool for communicators. It also has the potential to be a lot safer for brands, with less risk of share prices being tanked by an activist with $8 to spend. 

Anyone working in comms and PR should be getting up to speed on Mastodon, if only to explain to senior leadership why not to move to it just yet.

Liz Halliday is a writer and public sector communicator. She’s only about two weeks’ ahead of you on Mastodon. Her website is here.

Nelson Sullivan was a vlogger 16 years before the word was invented.

He was a YouTuber almost a quarter century before the platform first uploaded a video.

If you’re even half interested in the history of the recorded image he is every bit as important as the Parisian Lumiere brothers who first charged an audience to see moving images.

Nelson first picked up an early video camera in 1983 to give a first person recording of the creative New York dance and arts scene. A few years before his death in 1989 he bought a lightweight Hi-8 camera which he experimented with turning on himself making him the star narrator of his day.

Watch his clip ‘Nelson Sullivan’s Rendezvous with his Brother in the East Village in 1989’ and you’re seeing a time traveller.

He addresses the camera to tell us he’s waiting for his brother at a coffee shop. Annoyed at his lateness he decides to call him. Rather than pull out a mobile phone he heads to the payphone.

Later, he decides to head to a friends’ house. So he walks round there rather than call him. But that’s what people did.

In other clips, he wanders the tatty graffiti’d streets of New York with friends that include an undiscovered Rupaul. He passes people on the street with ghetto blasters on their shoulder playing music because the ipod hadn’t been invented yet.

I don’t know New York, but I’m aware that the tatty meatpacking district of the 1980s was decades away from its current gentrified status. Yet Sullivan and his friends find beauty in what they see whether that be a view, a building, an experience, a pier or a piece of art.

Sullivan died suddenly of a heart attack aged 39 and footage shot on more than 1,000 video tapes went into storage from where they were rescued. More than 700 have been uploaded to the 5ninethanevenueproject YouTube channel.

It’s New York history, gay history, music history, tech history and plain community history.

It teaches what he analogue world was like a few years before the internet changed everything. It teaches what life was like before the mobile. It teaches how cities can change. It teaches how technology can change. It shows how the everyday should be captured because one day it’ll be the ancient past. Like this trip to a McDonalds in 1989, spending Sunday afternoon in the park or taking his Mum to the top of the World Trade Centre.

What’s also fascinating is how people respond. His artistic friends don’t bat an eyelid. Passers by often wave when they see the camera such is the novelty value.

It’s fascinating.

You can find more about Nelson Sullivan here.

How many times should you post a day to Facebook?

If you search the internet you’ll find studies that tell you to post to Facebook between and one or two times a day. Ignore them.

Your recipe should not be dictated by numbers but instead by quality. 

You could post any old tosh twice a day and think you were doing good. You won’t be. The algorithm will take one look and show it to one man and his dog.

Newspapers will post anything from 20 to 60 times a day. For them, if the story is good enough and the content passes muster then they’ll press the send button. 

Instead, don’t think about numbers think about how good your content is. Be a gatekeeper.

STEP ONE: Check your audience

First things first, think of your Facebook page as a room and the people who like your page as the audience in it. Go and check your insights to see where they live, how old they are and if they are male or female. This will tell you who is in your room.

Once, I was asked to run a social media review on an organisation who lived in a tourist town to see why their content wasn’t working. They had a page with lots of local people but also a tranche of visitors.

When they posted about dog mess and scooping up after it the visitors would leave. This wasn’t the vision of holiday beauty they had signed up for. The answer was to keep the page for residents and create a separate page for visitors. 

So, if your Facebook page is largely females aged 35 to 55 use that as the yardstick for work. Ask yourself before you post ‘Will this work with them?’ If the answer is ‘yes’ then post it. If it’s not, then don’t. 

If you get pushback on your refusal to pollute your Facebook page with content that won’t work with the audience sweeten the pill by taking a screen shot of the insights. Tell them how you’d love to post it but the insights say it won’t reach your audience. Then ask them what their audience is and see if you can help them by doing something else.

STEP TWO: Remember the 80/20 rule

If you’re only posting calls to action then your page will fail. 

People want to be entertained and informed as well as lectured. 

Police forces, for example, will often post pictures of their dogs and their horses because they know this gets a good reaction. If you’ve liked a pic of the new police puppy you’ve more chance of being served something the admin really wants you to see. 

STEP THREE: Links are bad

Mark Zuckerburg does not want you to leave Facebook if he can help it. He wants you to stay so putting a link to somewhere else will see you penalised by the algorithm.

Instead, tell the story on the platform itself. If you need to put the link in as a comment. It’s what joe.co.uk already do. 

STEP FOUR: If its good enough then post it

If it works with the audience then think about posting it.

Video is the most engaging content then pictures and then text.  

Facebook is keen on content that will lead to meaningful interactions. Ask yourself if the content will lead to debate and discussion. 

Avoid at all costs repetition. The same picture of gritters when you go out gritting is a bad idea. The image of the police car wit the text ‘breaking news’ needs to be avoided. Familiarity breeds contempt. The algorithm hates it because it wants to be fed with fresh content. 

If all this means you post three times a day then post five times a day. If its only three times a week then do that.

For more content creation and algorithm sign-up for the ESSENTIAL COMMS SKILLS BOOSTER workshop. More here.  

It’s fair to say that Twitter has been undergoing turbulence these past few weeks.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk has paid £44 billion for a platform that’s been failing to grow past 300 million users globally for too many years.

First, there was talk about charging for verification and now there’s talk about charging for access to the whole platform. If that’s not enough as a barometer of the times early Twitter pioneer Stephen Fry has walked out on 12.5 million users.

https://twitter.com/queencharlot/status/1590293158331547650

Is it now time to talk about the public sector and Twitter? I think it probably is.

The argument for

Twitter is still a space where journalists hang out. It’s where you can find them.

Twitter is still good for breaking news. In a crisis, the platform does itsd best in the first five minutes and its worst five minutes later. Having a presence to correct misinformation in a crisis remains important.

Twitter still has some professional networks. There are corners of good practice still.

The argument against

Twitter at its worst is rancid. It damages the people you employ to monitor it.

Twitter’s best days of being a professional network are behind it. LinkedIn and Facebook groups fulfil the role 140 characters used to. We’ve swapped serendipity for security. This only follows a trend of fractured platforms and smaller spaces often semi-private like WhatsApp groups 

Twitter’s charging for blue ticks at a stroke undermines the trust in established voices.

Twitter feels like its a plaything for a spoilt billionaire. Every platform has a cut off point for free speech. With 4Chan it was anime child porn, with Facebook it was militant Islamic snuff videos with Twitter under new ownership its people who laugh at Elon Musk. 

The bottom line

While the arguments for and against are perfectly valid the acid test comes down to your audience. 

Are they still using it? 

In the UK, Twitter is the 6th largest platform whose future is magnified by an unhealthy fascinating shown by journalists.

You are already unlikely to be reaching your audience directly through Twitter.

Is this something to worry about? For me, not really. The time to worry if you don’t check what you’re doing like a good navigator.

Once, Friends Reunited and MySpace felt like the future. Now they are nowhere. This week, Sam Bankman-Friend’s $15.6 billion crypto fortune was wiped out in 24-hours. 

The pace of change then is unforgiving and constant.  

Right now, rather than take a Stephen Fry approach I’d be scaling back on Twitter use and take the nudge to research the wider comms landscape. There are other platforms. How are they being used? 

At some point, we’ll look back at Twitter with some fond memories and we’ll know how it all went wrong. It feels like that day is closer than Elon Musk thinks.

Back in 2013, the BBC’s former tech correspondent was invited to make predictions for the future as he had been on the money 40 years previously.

When asked about predictions for the next four decades that the pace of change would never be as slow as it was then.

I’ve thought of that comment often this year, as we emerged from lockdown into Westminster meltdown and the forecast of the worst recession in a hundred years. 

Public sector communicators need to be constantly learning and evolving.

You’re in luck. I read hundreds of blog sports and report every month so you don’t have to so I can make future comms easier.  

Nine bullet points and what to make of them 

Facebook makes a big change to its algorithm

“Our discovery engine work allows us to recommend all types of content beyond Reels as well, including photos, text, links, communities, short and long-form videos, and more. Second is that we can mix this content alongside posts from your family and friends, which can’t be generated by AI alone.” (Meta earnings call, October 2022)

This is huge. I need to translate its hugeness. Up until this year, Meta’s algorithm has been powered by connections. So, friends, families and accounts followed have been the driver. TikTok changed all that. They put interests first. It’s been a resounding hit with its audience. So much so that Meta have copied the idea with what they call their Discovery Engine. It’s basically a change for the algorithm to put things you may like in front of me rather than what my mate David Fradley has been up to this week.  

You lost control of the conversation a long time ago   

“On Twitter, just 3 per cent of conversations about a brand come from the brand’s own account. There is little influence over what people are saying about them.” (Brandwatch State of Social, October 2022).

A few years ago, the late Robert Philips published the iconoclastic ‘Trust Me: PR is Dead’. Industry voices were stung into outrage at the title. Not one took issue with the salient points he made in the book. One of the points is that we can no longer manage the message. We have lost control of it.  

Audiences are fragmenting

“Given the audience fragmentation, brands are now turning to smaller social media platforms and sites where they have a better shot at capturing the audience.” (Brandwatch State of Social, October 2022).

This captures a trend that has been accelerating for several years. We have moved away from the Town Square. We moved away because wankers with loudspeakers insisted on abusing anyone with an opinion. We have moved into smaller safer spaces. We have swapped serendipity for safety. 

TV is heading to be a minority past time

“TV’s golden age may be nearing the beginning of its end. Deloitte Global predicts that, in the United Kingdom, 2022 will be the final year that traditional television from broadcasters, whether live, time-shifted, or on demand, collectively makes up more than 50% of video viewing on all screens. We expect traditional TV broadcasters’ share of viewing hours among UK consumers, which was 73 per cent as recently as 2017, to fall to 53 per cent in 2022 and then to 49 per cent in 2023.” (Deloitte Insight, TMT Predictions, 2022).

I’m going to make the point again that how we consume video – as in moving images – is changing. In the UK of anywhere in the world they are changing fastest.

Music works

“As well as making content on TikTok more relatable, music also generates longer watch times on average and makes people less likely to skip content. It also impacts mood, making people feel more positive. Research show that instrumental music generates the strongest brand recall, while R&B, pop and rap are most related with brand likeability.” (TikTok Whats Next).

Music has become a key tool for communications. For TikTok there’s a huge library of sounds. For Reels there’s also a huge library and if anything, the Reels music list is more in tune with my own personal tastes than TikTok. Beatles? On Reels there is.

It’s still video, people

“Video continues to gain popularity, becoming the most engaging content format online, and Meta is the latest platform to launch a new Reel feature.” (Brandwatch State of Social, October 2022).

Look, I’ve been saying this for years but Brandwatch’s study concurs with this. The tech in your hand means you can watch as well as shoot video. The more time you spend watching video the more time you spend on the platform. So, of course video is going to make sense.

Reels is making progress

“There are now more than 140 billion Reels plays across Facebook and Instagram each day. That’s a 50% increase from six months ago.” (Meta earnings call, October 2022)

To say Meta have been pushing Reels strongly is something of an understatement. They’ve been going at it like the clappers. The numbers in this Meta announcement are that a corner has been turned by the platform. However, I’m still not quite convinced they’ve captured the creative fun of TikTok.  

Elections are still at risk

“At the Election Integrity Partnership, we have identified 10 factors that help determine a rumor’s potential to gain traction: uncertainty/ambiguity, diminished trust in media and authoritative sources of information, significance/impact, familiarity/repetition, compellingness of evidence, emotional appeal, novelty, participatory potential, origins and amplification in the social network and Inauthentic amplification or manipulation.” (Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. What makes an election rumour go viral? Look at these 10 factors. October, 2022)

Election interference is well mapped and well researched. Some things have taken place to prevent it but not nearly enough to be confident that democracy will survive to see the second half of the 21st century. It’s very easy as an individual to feel overwhelmed by the scale of the task. 

Facebook groups are evolving

“We’re adding more options for people to connect over shared interests, including Reels in Facebook Groups and updates to your Group profile.” (Meta, Introducing New Features to Facebook Groups. October 2022) 

New tools for Facebook groups indicate the value that Meta places on groups. Oh, and they’re allowing Reels. Did I mention that they’re quite keen on Reels? And that video is a thing?

Thanks for reading.

To get more fully up to speed on comms basics I deliver ESSENTIAL COMMS SKILLS BOOSTER training.

A major piece of benchmarking research has been launched in council, combined authority and fire comms. CIPR vice chair and experienced public sector communicator Mandy Pearse explains how yo can help.

One thing in life is guaranteed – everyone always has an opinion on their local council. 

What is interesting is what shapes that opinion and ultimately the reputation of the council. We assume that the Council’s communications should play a significant role, but equally the actions of the local politicians, the service delivery and the customer service may all impact.

When we start looking for hard evidence on what are the most influential factors it becomes more murky. 

Work has showed the importance of internal communications so that employees who are engaged in their workplace are more likely to speak highly of the organisation unprompted. I think of this advocacy as the pub test where someone is asked down the pub what they do for a living  and they will actually say they work for the Council and speak up for it.

Back in the days when we used to undertake the three-yearly BVPI survey we had some indicators such as resident satisfaction, value for money, how well informed and service satisfaction which we could compare across all authorities. The elements influencing that satisfaction score were how well informed people felt and their satisfaction with services such as refuse collection, recycling and green spaces.

But in our current digital but polarised society how much of this holds true? In one sense we can track our impact digitally more accurately than ever in terms of views, likes, shares, engagement, sentiment and links to action. 

We definitely see some stellar numbers on platforms like TikTok and some brilliant creative campaigns. But how much of that affects the reputation of the Council with the residents, tax payers, service users, partners and funders? How do you measure your reputation?

I’m keen to explore this and I’m starting with a major benchmarking survey. It’s open to any Head of Comms at a Council, combined authority or fire authority and all those who take part will get a summary of the findings.

You can complete the survey https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/Dan_benchmarking

It will take 20 minutes so have a break with a cuppa while you fill it in.

Mandy Pearse is director at Seashell Communications and CIPR Vice-President.