Ditching X? Make sure to think it through

It’s official: councils have given up on Twitter/X. In 2023, 17 councils left the platform, joining a further 13 who gave up on it over the previous 4 years.

Which means that as of today, just 13 councils out of 78 are regularly using X, and to be honest a lot of that use is half-hearted dump-and-run stuff presumably out of habit or to tick a box somewhere. 

For government departments, 12 of 31 are still regularly using X, but over the course of last year 8 abandoned the platform, including Corrections and MSD, as well as other big agencies like ACC. 

More will follow, and the exodus is understandable. The ongoing shitshow that is Elon added to the often toxic nature of debate (or just vile abuse) on the platform means X can be bloody hard work for public sector social advisors.

Engagement is also very low for all but 2-3 councils, with most public sector accounts seeing a drop in followers over the past 6 months, presumably because people are closing their accounts. But again, the organisations aren’t trying very hard to engage people either.

I (re)shut my own Twitter/X account late last year after just two months of testing. It was a short foray back into the platform I used to love a decade ago, but using it this time around just made me sad and angry. 

My plan had been to watch and learn how public sector organisations were using the platform, and showcase the best content I could find. But good content was rare, and it was mostly exactly the same stuff as on their other channels. Recycled, and unloved.

Some content was just automated website updates, and a lot of channels had already been abandoned. Almost no organisation was starting or joining conversations in any meaningful way. So I left. 

While most people won’t even notice their local council has ditched X, the consequences of the move will only become clear over time - especially when there’s an emergency, because that’s exactly where X came into its own.

The platform makes it easy to quickly see updates - from multiple agencies - in clear, chronological order. That last point is extremely important, because seeing updates out of order can have catastrophic consequences.

Using Facebook like X doesn’t make sense

When you try to use a platform in a way it wasn’t designed, and which users don’t appreciate, it can get awkward quickly. Twitter may be many things, but it is a place where real-time updates are expected and welcome. If that update doesn’t affect you, it doesn’t really matter, as the investment required to read the tweet is minimal. 

Without X, more councils across the country will be posting on Facebook about things like road closures and water outages, which is far from ideal. If an outage affects half the district, fine, but often they affect a few streets or a couple dozen houses.

When you have 10,000+ followers, wildly broadcasting a problem that affects a handful of people doesn’t make sense. It will reach the wrong people and/or get killed by the algorithm.

Worse than that, communicating irrelevant problems can do you damage over time. Imagine if Nike used their Facebook page to post about a missed shipment to a store in Lower Hutt. For those affected that might be useful, but the rest of their audience will be left scratching their heads or thinking that Nike are incompetent.

As I’ve written before, if you are constantly posting updates about water outages and road closures, it might seem like all your organisation is doing is fixing broken things - which for councils will never be the case due to the sheer number of services they provide.

And the worst part is that the impression you’ll be creating will be completely your doing - a communications own goal.

It’s generally around this point that someone points out that at times organisations need to be seen to communicate these types of updates, so they can show residents (and reporters) they at least tried. But is that really the game we want to be playing? Wrecking engagement on a channel to pretend we communicated? Hopefully not.

What are the alternatives?

So back to Twitter/X. If we have shelved it, and we don’t want to be spamming our Facebook or, worse, Instagram or LinkedIn followers with boring, niche updates, what should we do?

Like everything in comms and marketing, the answer is of course, it depends. But the age-old guidance of ‘right message, right audience, right time’ still holds.

If it’s a water outage for 10 houses on one street, then the most effective option is probably to go and tell them face to face or with printed letters. No one else needs to know.

If a minor road is closed and has clearly signposted detours, you might not need to do anything more than tell the people who live there. Everyone else will simply see the signs and take the detour - no big deal.

Training residents to visit a specific page on your website is another option, and one that I don’t see enough. If people know exactly where to go online when they experience an issue, they can then get the information they need to at least understand the nature of the problem. Think power cuts - you probably don’t go to social media when the lights go off, you go to the appropriate faults page on the company website.

Antenno has a lot of potential, too. If you don’t know it, Antenno is a product that allows councils to send alerts and notifications to residents via mobile app. Obviously it doesn’t work without an audience, and it takes time and dedication to advertise the service and convince enough people to sign up and then actually use it. Strategically, though, that could be a worthwhile focus of your efforts.

Another move is simply to stick it out on Twitter. Despite the repeated proclamations about its death, the platform is still very much alive; it is widely used, influential, and its real-time functionality and ability to let users aggregate information makes it extremely handy in emergencies. Is that functionality worth keeping in your back pocket just in case? 

Ultimately, it comes down to being smart and deliberate about how you use your channels, including thinking about exactly what your process for communicating will be in an emergency.

If you haven’t used your X account in years, don’t expect it to necessarily still be effective if you suddenly fire it up again in a natural disaster (if you can find the login details). 

Instead, do the hard yards now to make sure that everyone on your team knows how to share information in a way that is clear, chronological, and easy to update, and that your audiences know exactly where to go when the shit hits the fan.

The more thinking and planning you do now, the better off you and your audiences will be. And the less likely you’ll regret ditching X.

Got any questions or comments? Email me at seamus@seamus.nz