From 0 to 20.000 in a year! And then what?
September 19, 2011
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The @EU_Commission Twitter account hit 20.000 followers on Friday 16 September. This happened approximately one year after we renamed the experimental account we created for the G20 in Canada in June 2010 and decided to tweet as the Commission and not just occasionally as the president’s press team.
Currently we are getting around 500 new followers per week, which is quite impressive I think, for an account that mainly tweets press releases and does not really do “interactive” (following back, replying to comments/questions). The last 3 months we have gained around 8.000 followers – that’s twice as many as @NeelieKroesEU got in the same period.
Wiew the @EU_Commission stats on TwitterCounter.
Honestly, treating the Twitter feed as a news outlet is often the easiest solution. Most of the mentions of the account are either RTs or what I call “namedropping”, and then we have a fair portion of Euroskeptics who are rarely very constructive. So it would be a minimum we would be responding to anyway. Of course it would be great if we could be more interactive, but unfortunately it takes a lot of time and monitoring, and furthermore people usually respond to specific topics which we are not specialized in here in the Europa Web Team.
Managing streams of news
Instead of focusing on replying, we are trying to develop the account’s service level by curating other EC/EU accounts in our Twitter lists and facilitate what I call streams of news. New accounts are popping up every day; Commissioners, Representations, Delegations, Commission Departments (DGs) are opening accounts and it is very difficult to stay on top of all the voices appearing.
Twitter is like a vast ocean and when I explain it to my colleagues in the Spokespersons’ Service I often use the water metaphor to explain Twitter lists to them, how you can separate the good/relevant streams from all the rest of the noise, so that it is easier to monitor and react to what is actually important to you.
A distributed, bottom up approach to interactivity?
It is not ideal to be on social media without actually engaging with the audience, but I think the only way we can orchestrate this is by getting our colleagues in departments and local offices engaged. I do reply from my own account now and then if there is a comment or question to @EU_Commission which is related to my work on Europa, and it would be ideal if my colleagues across departments and local offices would be doing the same thing and engaging directly with their main target audiences (based on language, geography, interests etc).
This morning I went through the steps of this new online strategy tool – it did ask some very enlightening questions and categorized us as in a transition phase with regards to social media use. We have passed the initial trial phase, but are still struggling to start using a more strategic approach to social media. We are simultaneously mobilizing people, training them, building monitoring capacity and creating networks internally, but our next big move will definitely be to add a strategic layer to our social media activities and to work out how to better exploit the knowledge in the network of colleagues.
This is a very exciting and very complicated time. As many other organizations we still struggle to make the Social Media ROI visible to the senior management, but I believe we need to treat this as an investment: learning from experiences, sharing knowledge, training, discussing, coaching, all the things we do right now are making us more capable of navigating the mew media landscape. We have taken the jump last year, we are slowly learning to swim, but we still lack the elegance and agility that comes from truly understanding Social Media!
Looking forward to your reactions!
//Anne
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September 19th, 2011 at 4:48 pm
„So it would be a minimum we would be responding to anyway. Of course it would be great if we could be more interactive, but unfortunately it takes a lot of time and monitoring, and furthermore people usually respond to specific topics which we are not specialized in here in the Europa Web Team.”
After all it is a simple question of how interactive the commission wants to be and how much money it wants to spend. The example of @db_bahn shows that even a huge company as the Deutsche Bahn is able to respond to every question asked via Twitter. I’d give it a try.
September 20th, 2011 at 8:32 am
Nice post, Anne.
Glad to see Neelie is the reference by which we judge ourselves.
September 26th, 2011 at 8:01 am
Glad to see a post exploring the ’social media and scale’ problem you guys face here.
If you were to scale up centrally, you’d still face what I’d call ‘the DG COMM issue’, which is that no central team can possibly interact <i>usefully</i> on every policy issue the Commission covers, as the people you’d be interacting will often know more about their particular topic of interest than any generalist could.
So you either meed to train, empower & trust everyone in the EC, or build a two-level system: a central OCM team, plus a lightning-fast, EC-wide internal network through which selected questions can be escalated and answered fast enough to be useful to a social media audience.
As pointed out earlier, the OCM team badly needs Web1 backup in the form of a high-quality, user-centric, up-to-date, multilingual interface to EUROPA, organised according to topics rather than Institutions or DGs. Building such an interface would require a cross-EC content partnership, which would give you the internal network you’d need for the 2nd level, more detailed responses.