Last week, we announced the Federal Social Media Index, a dashboard tracking 125 federal government agencies and departments on Twitter. The results were inspiring, with some great media coverage and a flood of requests from agencies asking to get involved.
This week, NASA takes the Top Agency spot on the FSMI, with 67 responses to the nine questions they asked of their staggering 1.6M followers, and a total 360 replies to their posts. Congrats!
Media Reactions
The FSMI launch received some nice coverage in the press. NextGov wrote a feature about the launch, pulling some insights and interesting tidbits out of the first week of data. "Early results show that federal agencies with a relatively low number of Twitter followers are sometimes engaging much more with their followers than more popular agencies," they wrote.
techPresident wrote, "The brilliant part about this application is that it takes the same API that provides metrics used by other services to encourage people to plod along inside the social media hamster wheel and puts it to a constructive purpose: Encourage public agencies, through the delivering of recognition, to have two-way conversations with people. And the more people the better."
Mediabistro's All Twitter pitched the FSMI as a tool for government watchdogs, letting you "turn the tables and keep tabs on what they’re doing." Federal Computer Week added, "Just having a lot of followers isn't enough to show real engagement. If no one is responding to an agency's tweets, it might not be doing as well at engaging with citizens as it appears." Pat Fiorenza of GovLoop called it "a cool step in the right direction."
Government Response
Many federal employees took notice of the launch and spread the news, including FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate.
In the first week, we've had representatives from two dozen agencies representing hundreds of new Twitter accounts contact us, asking to be included in the Index.
Representatives from a wide range of federal agencies have reached out to us, including:
- The Department of Transportation
- National Guard
- General Services Administration
- Department of State
- Recovery.gov
- Small Business Administration
- Air Force
- Army Security Assistance Command
- Veterans Affairs
- National Institute of Health
- Federal Trade Commission
- Environmental Protection Agency
- Army Corps of Engineers
- US Embassy for Japan
- Broadcasting Board of Governors
Many of these people manage several Twitter accounts, which should more than double the number of accounts we track! Insane.
Overall, we're thrilled by the response in the first week and are reaching out to everyone directly to make sure they're directly measured and included in the Index.
It feels like there's a huge demand for understanding the impact these social media efforts are having on the world, and there's a strong sense of pride from those getting recognition for doing it well.
Work at an agency and want to get involved? Let us know here and we'll set you up!
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