Blog: In West Mercia Police’s Corporate Communications Unit we have recently looking back on how we dealt locally with the national outbreak of disorder and violence that occurred in August, writes the force’s Web Development Officer Neil Tipton.

Locally we not only had to deal with understandable concerns that some of the national issues would arise in West Mercia, but we also had to deal with the challenges presented by protest planned by the EDL (English Defence League) and opposition groups in Wellington on Saturday 13 August.

Looking back from our unit’s point of view, it was not just police officers on street patrols who had a busy week – the events nationally and locally saw an explosion of interest in our Facebook and Twitter accounts. We gained lots of new followers and page ‘likes’ as people signed up to get accurate information as to what was happening around the force area.

As a result, the Corporate Communications team had to put in place a shift structure so that we could keep people up to date with the latest news and respond to the many hundreds of comments and tweets we received. A 2am finish was our late night record and coffee was certainly our friend all that week.

Here are some statistics to illustrate quite how much additional interest was generated that week:

• On Twitter, we went from just over 2,000 followers to 4,210 in the course of just 24 hours. By the end of the week we had over 5,400 followers.

• Our Facebook page was just as popular. We began the week with just over 1,800 ‘likes’ – by the end of the week this had swelled to more than 4,300, with 479 comments in six days.

In return we had many messages of support and the occasional brickbat, but overall we felt that we were able to provide a useful ‘rumour control’ service, provide people with reassurance and give details of what we were doing in response to specific incidents.

All done (hopefully) in a straightforward way with, at times, a touch of humour to lighten the mood.

So, following our review, where do we go from here?

We already knew that social media was a key part of modern life for many people and the events of that particular week only served to reinforce that. What’s clear now is that it is also a key part of modern policing, and we will be looking to develop our social media channels further in the coming months.

We won’t have got everything right during that week – we’re only human after all – but it seems we did do many things well. However, we clearly need to take on board the lessons that we learned to ensure that our social media service is taken to the next level.

Interaction with the public is vital if we are to continue to develop this area of communication work.

Please remember that we are always open to constructive criticism and therefore please do let us know if you think there are things we could do differently in the future that might help improve the service that we provide.