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Police Using Twitter: Five Ways To Improve Police Social Media Engagement

By: Marijean Jaggers | 09/08/2009

Last month I wrote a post about how I want my local police to use social media. My colleague, Justin Lopinot shared a link with me via Instant Messenger as a follow up to the post. The link pointed to a story in Justin's market, about St. Louis-area police joining Twitter. There are three St. Louis police departments using Twitter:

• O'Fallon, Mo. http://twitter.com/ofallonpolice - Following 6, Followers 106
• Chesterfield, Mo. http://twitter.com/ChesterfieldPD - Following 0, Followers 418
• St. Louis County, Mo. http://twitter.com/stlouiscountypd - Following 5, Followers 419

Since in my original post on this topic, in which I extolled the values of social media for law enforcement organizations, I've grown concerned about the way these police departments are engaging -- and know there are several ways they could be using their Twitter accounts more effectively.

1. Set up individual accounts, so, RJonesatSTLCoPD would be an example of a Twitter handle of an individual officer on Twitter. People want to interact with a human, not a logo, so the profile should include the officer's photo.

2. Follow people in your community. As you can see above, not one of them are actually following others; they should start by following those that are following them.These departments, new to Twitter, may not know how to go about finding people to follow.  Here's how: go to www.Tweepz.com and click advanced search. Enter loc:(CITY/COUNTY NAME). Here you go, O'Fallon, Mo. -- I've done half the work for you, here's a good starting list of the people in your community using Twitter.

3. Find a Twitter management tool that you like. I like TweetDeck. Here's a list of possible Twitter management tools for you to consider or try. The advantage of using this kind of tool is that the user can organize the people they're following into groups, more quickly and easily respond, retweet or direct message followers, and, perhaps the biggest benefit of all, view tweets, @ replies and direct messages on one screen. Mobile apps (I use Tweed and Spaz) for smartphones are useful as well, and enable the user to review replies and DMs very easily. 

4. Be human. The police departments will only develop relationships with their community members if they become community members themselves. An effort should be made by the police officers to ask questions in tweets, to retweet what others in the community share and to truly connect - as people - by sharing personal tweets. 

5. Integrate Twitter into other efforts. If there's content on the police department's Web site or other Web sites or blogs, Facebook or other social networking presences, point visitors toward the Twitter account and back to content that is longer than 140 characters. 

There are so many ways police can successfully use social media to really connect with their communities. If they're going to enter the social media space, they'll need to improve their engagement to actually reap the benefits; otherwise I predict their presence on Twitter will be short-lived.

Posted in Digital Communications