ONS Digital

This week London played host to its annual Social Media Week. It came at a neat point for ONS’s social media team who have been busy stepping things up a gear for optimum referrals, engagement and monitoring.

We published a series of internal comms articles on patterns we’re seeing from our our monitoring work and what’s in store for social media at ONS, specifically around mobile, semantic web and insight and conversion rate optimisation. I also presented at all three ONS sites to over 100 colleagues eager to understand more about ‘Social Media @ ONS’. I also held drop in sessions at each site for one to one chats which covered everything from the very basic to how we can take exposure to some releases even further – all of which was very encouraging. Between them some questions that arose were:

• How can we promote social media – and indeed our outputs – to our respondents?
• How can we monitor the comments section of newspaper website articles and respond accordingly?
• Could Population create a campaign to push some upcoming releases?

Overall attendance and participation in the sessions was really good and encouraging. Attendees plotted themselves on a scale of advanced (11%), intermediate (44%) or light (45%) social media experience which demonstrates that we have some work to do to increase staff social media skills.

The week has been a good learning curve for us and planning is already underway for the next one in February. We would like to do more (like our colleagues at BIS) focusing on developing social media skills.

Andrew Clark

Head of Social Media