How to boost the interaction in governemnt social media

It is not easy to boost the fruitful interaction between the government and people in social media.  When I look back the days I worked for the division of public housing in the ministry, it was difficult to understand that there was not many interaction in the social media despite the thousands of followers. I was in charge of housing policy and PR (Public Relations). So when the government announced the plans for supplying new housing or amendment of rules on housing supply, I released the statement to the press. I had to launch a campaign and manage the website. Also I had to manage the twitter account of public housing which was already created before. At that time the followers were slightly over 1,000 which was a very small number, considering that 100 thousand of public housing had been supplied every year. And when I twitted to inform the change in policy, there was not any retweet or reply at all.

I began to wonder why people are not showing any interest to the tweets although the housing issue is a really big deal in Korea. And I learned from the other staff that majority of the initial followers are not real demanders of public housing. When the twitter account for public housing was first created by outsourcing, the subcontracted company had to increase the followers in a short period. They randomly collected the followers. As a result, a large number of people who didn’t care about public housing policy became followers. No wonder that they remained quite at my tweets. Also the problem was that the people who are interested in public housing tend to get information from the traditional media or website rather than social media. The main target of public housing is people who are in the age range of late 20’s to 40’s and who are below the middle class. The older or the poorer they are, the less they used social media. Therefore, the social media was not an appropriate tool to access to our target.

However, it was too early to give up the potential demanders on Twitter. I regularly twitted the news for the demanders. And I held the quiz event with a small prize at my own expense. Gradually followers began to increase and interaction took place though it was not vigorous. It was difficult to keep up, because I was in charge of other works which were regarded more important in the division. But I learned that it is important to initiate and provide the opportunity to involve people to the conversation. And I believe that it would have been better if I could fully put my time and effort to the social media.

It is difficult for the government to draw the interest of the people and interact with them in social media in the beginning. However, if we aim the right target, set the right stage and have the right people to work, it is not impossible to achieve our goal in the long term.

 

   * My major takeaway from my experience

Consider the real target audience.

Set the stage to have attention.

Have staffs who can be fully involved in social media.