Shropshire 360 Live is a resounding success

An innovative project to connect the council with people using social media has been a great success.

Shropshire Council used Twitter and Facebook to tell people what various services were doing for seven days, starting on Monday 13 June 2011.  Different services “tweeted” their daily work and invited the public to join in the conversation – helping to spread the word about the huge variety of services the council provides each day.

We sent over 800 tweets from the @Shrop360 account, acquired 244 followers, and were retweeted in the USA, South Africa and Scandinavia.  There was also a jump of over 300 followers for the main council Twitter account too.

Infographics were used as a way of showing statistical information for the first time, which has been really popular.

First indications suggest that the project reached about 40,000 people and there was a 27 per cent increase in web traffic during the week.

Councillor Martin Taylor-Smith, cabinet member for IT, said:

“Social media is a really great way of talking to a lot of people very quickly and costing virtually nothing.  Thousands of people read the various tweets we issued last week, and the feedback was really positive from people who found the project a real window to the workings of the council.  Following the success of this project, we’ll be considering how best to embrace this new technology more and more in the future.”

Council leader, Keith Barrow, added:

“There has been a huge variety of things talked about, from school meals to repairing roads, and even a debate about how Shropshire would cope with a zombie invasion.  Millions of people use Twitter and Facebook every day, so we’d be missing a trick if we didn’t engage with them.”