ONS Digital

Prynhawn da / Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s round-up.

What’s been happening?

Feedback on our move to a shorter, more accessible Twitter username has been extremely positive, making it easier for users to directly mention us in their conversations. Following the changeover of our twitter account to @ONS last week, there has been an immediate impact on the way that users refer to us, with the new handle taking 39% of all mentions in the first week.  This was despite lower overall mentions due to it being a quieter week.  We will continue to monitor the pattern of these mentions over time, and where possible, guide people and make them aware of the new @ONS handle to increase our user engagement.

Also, a reminder that our website user survey closes in a week. Please take the time to give us your feedback on your experiences so that we can make improvements that benefit you.

Other news

Last week also saw the first of two presentations to staff on the how using the right metadata can improve the findability of our content. The aim was to educate staff on how their descriptions and key words are used by search engines to return results. Using real examples, our search specialist gave top tips on, crafting a readable, compelling description using important keywords to help improve the click-through rate.  Those who did attend were extremely positive, leaving more convinced of the links between what they publish and how it is used by external search engines. However, there is a more work to be done to convince others of the benefits that getting the metadata right will bring.

Members of the Digital Publishing team  were invited to join a workshop with university students to look at our economic statistical outputs. Understanding our users is essential to widening the reach of our products and whilst the focus was on the statistics, we had the opportunity to talk through and get feedback on some recent developments, such as the Key Economic Time Series Page. Watch this space for more on the session and what we learned.

and finally….
Our User Insight team attended the annual digital communications conference “Reaching more people” hosted by govdelivery. The agenda was packed with useful insight into how to effectively measure impact, and provided tactics  to help drive customer actions and  meet channel shift and mission goals. We will post on what we learned and how we will put it into action shortly.