Using social media to warn, inform and update

There were two significant storms which hit Leicestershire over the course of October and November 2023 – storm Babet and storm Ciaran. Both storms caused major flooding in many of Leicestershire’s rural areas which meant that local residents needed to be kept up to date on any flood warnings in advance, and informed of the precautions that they would need to take in order to reduce risk. The challenge – what would be the most effective channel of communication to get these important messages across to those who needed them?

As with any campaign of this nature, a multi-channel approach was implemented, with social media playing an important role in the County Council’s communications, alongside media relations and sharing key message toolkits with partner organisations. The Comms Team worked closely with Highways and Transport colleagues to monitor changes in weather and manage outgoing messages. Utilising the Scheduling function within Orlo to send out a series of social posts across Facebook and X predominantly, proved especially useful when posting out of hours. Orlo’s Campaign tool also came in useful, allowing the team to easily track the effectiveness of the comms being shared under the child campaign ‘Flooding’ and the parent campaign ‘Winter’, while also using the Post Tagging ability within the platform to identify posts specifically related to ‘Babet’ and ‘Ciaran’. This approach has enabled a more in-depth analysis of what has been working well for the County Council in its efforts to warn, inform and update residents.

The strong and consistent messaging on social media, across all key agencies involved meant that residents received matching information across all local, trusted authorities thanks to the collaborative messaging, with both Leicestershire Police and the Environment Agency contacting the team to acknowledge the usefulness of the social media toolkit that was shared.

“These posts have been really useful to us, and we’ll continue to amplify your messages.”
East Midlands Environment Agency

By having a social media management tool in place during this time, the County Council was able to look back on and assess the effectiveness of the campaign using Orlo’s suite of Analytics to review reach, link clicks, engagement and more. One of the most powerful stats showcased that the team had over 1,417 views of different flood-related web pages, signposted from their social posts – the top one being the ‘Report a flood’ page with over 516 views over the period.