I Saw it on my Feed! Building Trust with Social Media
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has become a viral sensation with its quirky and effective online content. Social Media Manager Heather Lansdowne explains the inspiration and the tradecraft behind its success.
Social media has transformed many aspects of our lives – and governance is no exception. Platforms such as Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram, and LinkedIn have made it possible to engage with citizens in ways that were never imaginable before. Amid this new opportunity, however, a sense of distrust and anxiety has emerged.
The Edelman Trust Barometer is a well known global survey that measures trust in institutions across 28 countries. Its most recent report had an ominous theme: “Navigating a polarised world.” It found that, while there are some countries where it has grown, overall trust in government has fallen. In fact, a majority of people now view their government as incompetent and unethical.
This increasing sense of mistrust, paired with a general lack of faith in traditional and social media, has created a unique challenge for directors of communication and social media managers working for government agencies. In the age of “deepfakes” and “fake news”, how can we create effective communication strategies to bridge the trust divide?
Meeting People Where They Are
Despite the apparent mistrust in social media, more than four billion people remain active users, representing over half of the global population. This number is expected to increase to almost six billion by 2027 thanks to the opportunities social media offers to keep in touch with others, build new communities, engage in the latest trends, and share milestones, experiences, and achievements. The sense of satisfaction that comes with each new like or comment continues to keep people of all ages hooked to their devices.
As well as producing content, those four billion social media users are also consuming it – in prodigious quantities. The wealth of compelling and hyper-engaging content available on social media platforms, and the development of algorithms that are becoming ever better at predicting what users want, are only making it easier to lose a few hours here and there to an unplanned social media binge. From never-ending YouTube rabbit holes to viral dancing videos on TikTok, the endless array of content that exists to cater to every conceivable niche is impossible to resist.
One of the most important areas is news. For all the worries about social media misinformation, platforms such as Facebook and X are hugely popular ways to stay up to date with current events. In fact, seven in 10 Americans reported that they used social media as a news source in 2022. If the signals from X’s owner Elon Musk, who has sought to position the platform as a source for more news and current affairs commentary, are to be believed then this is only the beginning.
As government communicators, we cannot afford to ignore social media and its impact. Understanding our target audience and their platform preferences is crucial. Different demographics prefer different platforms and may use them to meet any combination of needs. With the right strategies, all of them can be a chance to reach out and share a valuable message.
Learning from the Rise of TikTok
The fastest rising star in the social media firmament is undoubtedly TikTok. The platform reached one billion users faster than any other social media app in history and its success offers many lessons for how government agencies can make the most of social media on any platform.
TikTok is simple and easy to consume. Its user-friendly interface and intuitive editing tools make it fun and straightforward to create content. Key information is delivered in bite-sized, visually stimulating formats to capture attention and help users learn through entertainment. The “For You” page is, as the name suggests, curated automatically for each user’s tastes using TikTok’s famously powerful algorithm. This has created a shift in focus from receiving updates from friends or family to a feed that is based around the user’s personal interests.
TikTok’s rise in popularity can also be attributed to its emphasis on authenticity. Gone are the days of perfectly curated Instagram feeds, replaced by candid videos that profess to present the real person behind the façade, providing insights into the creators’ lives. This openness and authenticity breeds an enormous sense of trust between creators and their followers, a trust that governments are already learning they can build through their own social media content.
Fun, Facts, and Familiarity
So, how can we take features that have helped make TikTok so popular, and apply them to government communications?
It is essential to balance framing our agencies as a source of authority and expertise in our given fields with being authentic and transparent by sharing personal stories and engaging in conversations with our constituents. Take, for example, Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), which shares fascinating bite-sized insights into all things science and nature.
Aside from the bread-and-butter scientific content, it also frequently shares human pieces, from endearingly cringy job advertisements to photos of staff celebrating Pride Week. CSIRO has built one of the most-followed Australian Government presences on social media through a skilful mix of reliable, trustworthy information and fun, quirky, and human content.
Adding a liberal sprinkling of humour to certain posts has helped us reach a larger audience, with humorous posts achieving up to 80 times more impressions and engagements compared with the average post.
Similarly, at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), we focus on providing simple, informative content in easy-to-consume chunks. Adding a liberal sprinkling of humour to certain posts has helped us reach a larger audience, with humorous posts achieving up to 80 times more impressions and engagements compared with the average post. These simple, relatable posts are successful on all channels, building our audience and ensuring our corporate content (a key data release or case study, for example) is still seen by a wide and engaged audience.
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) is another agency following similar principles. The AFP balances its more serious posts on missing persons, drugs, and crime with light-hearted messages to keep its audience entertained and give them a break from the weightier content.
Modern Technology, Timeless Values
Social media is ever-changing. Trends, controversies, and even entire platforms seem to come and go in an instant. Yet while the details may change, the phenomenon is here to stay. We have a duty to use social media as effectively as we can to share messages and connect with the people that we serve.
Developments in emerging platforms such as TikTok can help us understand our target audiences better. New features offer opportunities to create innovative content, blending text, images, and videos to share stories and information. However, at its heart, social media success rests on principles that would be familiar to government communicators going back decades – if not longer. Simplicity, authenticity, accuracy, and humanity have always mattered. Marrying these timeless values with the new tools of social media can help us establish credibility, relatability, and, ultimately, trust, to win back the hearts and minds of the public.
Back to Basics – Seven Steps to
a Winning Social Media Strategy
These simple guidelines can easily be applied whether your organisation already has a social media presence or not.
If your agency or department is new to social media, you will need to make sure the relevant leaders are supportive of your plans. There can be some nervousness around newer platforms and it often helps to share the benefits, as well as the risks and how you plan to manage them. If you can, find an executive sponsor to help champion your plans, and make sure to include a lot of examples of innovative ways government agencies have used social media to connect with their communities. A short-term pilot can be a good way to get things off the ground.
A social media strategy should include an easily recognisable style that will come to be associated with the organisation and ought to be in line with the broader corporate branding. Using consistent colours, fonts, and types of images creates a clear, professional presence. The profiles of similar organisations can be a rich source of inspiration.
Once you have the go-ahead from executive leadership and your style guide prepared, it is a good idea to create a social media calendar. This should include both relevant news from your organisation as well as events, holidays, or anniversaries that your agency can use to contribute to relevant conversations.
Think about how you might link your chosen themes or special day to the work your agency does. This is also the best time to conduct a sensitivity check, researching the context of your theme and considering the public reaction, before you start to craft a post. Do not be afraid to get creative – sometimes the more outlandish the idea, the better the response will be. “Dad humour” – relevant and inoffensive jokes, puns, or rhymes – is an easy way to add a little interest to an otherwise dry topic.
Before publishing, set up an approvals process. It is important to strike a balance, finding a clearance level that is high enough to provide a good awareness of broader organisational concerns but not so high as to create a bottleneck. Consider if you can bulk-approve content (for example on a weekly basis) to help streamline your process. For sensitive topics, such as a post about Pride Week or mental health, there may be internal or external resources or networks that can provide feedback and help you avoid unintentionally offending your audience.
After you have hit publish, monitor the comments to find out how your post has been received. Engaging with followers, for example by answering follow-up questions or liking their responses, helps them to feel involved and can provide useful inspiration for future posts.
Hopefully the feedback on your posts is positive, but it is also important to have a plan in case things go wrong. For small errors, one option is to edit the caption of your post to reflect minor changes. For larger mistakes, you may need to delete the original post and re-upload a corrected version. If the tone of the post has caused offence, it is likely better to delete it and issue a statement acknowledging the feedback and your steps to correct it.
Keep a record of any mistakes and consider whether extra steps need to be added to your approval process. Making an error is not ideal, but remaining transparent and accountable when you do can actually foster greater trust between you and your audience.
Regularly review the performance of your posts (at least fortnightly to monthly) to take stock of what is and is not working and use those findings to inform your future content. Remember to share your achievements across your organisation, too. As social media managers, we need to communicate the value of the work we do to make sure we are afforded the resources to continue.
Endnotes
