1. Hannah Goulbourne, Communications

2. Why is social media important?
 Social media provides a direct method of communication
between yourselves, and the community
 It’s a way of receiving instant reviews/feedback
 You can promote events and services at no cost
 You can generate a large amount of content with ease
 Instant, real-time communication enables you to keep
conversations running
 Its easy! If you can text, you can tweet.

3. Your social media goals
All social media should have a goal!
Why do organisations use social media?
 For business communication
 To keep your community up to date
 To encourage a community to be involved in something
 To reach out to potential customers
 To drive traffic to your website or blog
 To SHOUT ABOUT what we’re good at!
Social media messages should be pre-planned each week so you can plan
your posts around your goals and it’s important to be responsive.

4. Twitter
Twitter is a communication tool that allows you to send and receive short
messages within your Twitter community.
Your Twitter community:
- People you follow – You are free to follow any account, but to define
your Twitter community, you want to be following accounts that have
similar interests to yourselves. Following someone means you subscribe
to their tweets .
- People who follow you – Other people read your tweets and decide to
follow you. Your followers will see the tweets you send out.

5. What are Tweets?
Tweets are short, snappy messages made up of only 140 characters.
They can also include a picture, a short video or a web link.
You don't have to generate original content in order to send Tweets. You can
simply share the Tweets that other people create, forwarding their message to all
of your followers. This is calling Retweeting.
Remember when tweeting:
People – Content – Engagement – Participation

6. Getting past the character limit
 The 140 character limit can sometimes be tricky to overcome, especially when
wanting to put across direct information
 It’s important not to omit important information due to the limit – think ‘what
is the most important message I need to relay in this tweet’ and tweak the rest
 Write full information down first – and then tweak to fit 140 characters
 Try and avoid over-abbreviating, tweets need to look professional, considered
and well-written
 Try and leave room for a call-to-action if it’s needed
 Don’t waste any characters! If you have some space remaining, add a relevant
hashtag

7. What works well on Twitter
 News based tweets
 Hashtags to enable easy search
 Asking questions to directly position followers into
conversations
 Mixture of word and image-based content
 Easy ability to tag and mention other accounts promotes
engagement

8. So what do you tweet?
 … anything that will interest your followers!
 Current status
 Questions
 Local events and attractions
 Local/good news stories
 Local and city-wide service information
 Campaigns – city-wide and local level
Think about what you want to achieve and which channels are best for
reaching your target audience. For example, if you’re aiming to reach
businesses then you may consider Twitter to be more useful than
Facebook

9. Who should I follow?
When you decide to follow someone you are subscribing to their tweets.
The people/organisations/groups you follow determine what you read on
your Twitter timeline.
In general, you might follow:
 People in your local community
 Customers
 Peers and people in your industry
 Service providers
Don’t limit yourself to groups you already know as you could be missing
out on valuable content.

10. Facebook
Facebook is a free social networking website that allows registered users
to create profiles, upload photos and video, send messages and keep in
touch with friends, family and colleagues.
Features include:
Groups - allows members who have common interests to find each other
and interact.
Events - allows members to publicise an event, invite guests and track
who plans to attend.
Pages - allows members to create and promote a public page built around
a specific topic.
Facebook ads – allows members to create targeted adverts that will reach
more people.

11. What works well on Facebook
 Visual/image-based posts
 A nod to humour increases shareability
 Personal language
 Detailed information – enjoy not being restricted by a character limit!
 Questions – facilitate direct conversations via the comment function

12. Decide upon a ‘personality’
Your personality is what makes you likeable, or in terms of Twitter
followable!
Your personality should be:
 Positive
 Light-hearted
 Informative
 Engaging
 Knowledgable

13. How often should I post?
 There is no set rule for the perfect amount of times to post
 As a general aim, one post per day on Facebook, and two or three times
on Twitter, This excludes weekends, but if there were messages you
wanted to share then you can schedule post and tweets to go out when
you’re not there.
 You should also do a quick scan of the social feeds to make sure that
you don’t miss any useful, external content to retweet from other
services, groups/partners

14. When should I post?
 You can find out which times your Facebook fans are the most
active online, which is highly useful when scheduling content.
 By publishing posts at times when your audience is most active,
you are ensuring the highest possible reach and engagement
levels on social posts
Facebook
1. Log into the page you are posting for
2. Click on ‘Insights’
3. Click on ‘Posts’
4. The ‘When your Fans are Online’ tab shows you a graph that
tells you when your Facebook fans are active.

15. How to increase engagement
 Linking to other parts of the council, sharing content from other
departments will boost internal reputation.
 Re-tweeting external content from groups and organisations we
know.
 Re-tweeting all tweets where your account is mentioned in
 Tweet more informative tweets – to balance out the amount of
retweets, and give followers something to engage with/reply to.
 Sharing content from other sources will add variation to the
news feed, increasing visibility, and encouraging interaction

16. How to measure success
We can measure social success in the following ways:
 Document the amount of new followers/fans your account receives
 Documenting the social interaction received – (e.g.
shares/RT’s/Comments/Like etc.)
 Use analytic tools through Twitter, or Facebook’s Insights platform to
view the best performing posts.
 Tools like Bitly will allow you to see how successful a link has been –
clicks generated

17. Other social media
 YouTube – all video upload requests must be made to
digitalaccessteam@leeds.gov.uk They are the only
team with access to the LCC YouTube channel
 Instagram – mobile photo and video sharing service.
Allows you to tell a story through images.
 Storify – Creates stories using social media – great for
highlighting how successful a social media campaign
has been.

18. Where do we want to be? - Twitter
Option one
 Have just one Twitter account focusing around a particular
issue that is city-wide. For example “A cleaner, greener
Leeds” which focuses on littering, dog fouling, fly tipping,
recycling etc
 Helps to create a brand
 A platform for a city-wide anti littering campaign, where
local and national environmental issues and campaigns
(Clean for the Queen, Keep Harehills Tidy) can tag on to
 Can use hashtags to drill down to local level/place e.g.
#Harehills, #HydePark #Armley. Use of hashtags will help
with monitoring and linking to local conversations

19. Where do we want to be? - Twitter
Option two
 Have just one account called Environmental Action Leeds, combining
localities, Environmental Health and Street Cleansing
 Covers general environmental issues, not focusing on one
particular issue
 Brings community engagement together in one place
 Can use hashtags to drill down to local level/place e.g.
#Harehills, #HydePark #Armley. Use of hashtags will help with
monitoring and linking to local conversations
Localities, Environment Health and Street Cleansing will all have
access to post and manage the account

20. Where do we want to be? -
Facebook
Option one
 To have one Facebook account, and provide publishing
rights to staff within the different support teams
 Brings community engagement together in one place
 Cross posting and linking to the other services available
One disadvantage is there are currently a number of local
community groups on Facebook that we would like to
connect with and some of these groups are closed. Pages are
unable to join a closed group. One way round this would be
to have one personal account for each locality, enabling us to
connect with the groups to share relevant information

21. Where do we want to be? -
Facebook
Option two
 To not have a Facebook equivalent of Twitter. This
would mean also deleting existing Locality Facebook
accounts
 Instead only set up Facebook pages for certain
campaigns where it is relevant and where community
involvement needs to be encouraged. Because
Facebook is more personal than Twitter then this is a
good platform to use to set up events that you want
residents to be invited to

22. What are we trying to achieve?
 We want to encourage and educate more people to be
greener and cleaner
 We want to boost civic pride in terms of keeping your
community and city clean
 We want to highlight to local people the good work we do
in communities and city-wide, with a particular focus on
the areas that need it most
 We want to make people aware of city-wide and local
environmental facts and figures
 We want to connect with networks of local people,
businesses and organisations to encourage them to work
with us better to resolve issues (social contract)