Town enters Facebook arena

The Town of New Glasgow can now be found on one of the world’s most popular social networking sites.
New Glasgow officially joined Facebook on November 23, 2011. By “liking” the official page, residents and visitors can receive the latest updates in town events, performances at Glasgow Square Theatre, games at John Brother MacDonald Stadium, news releases, photos and more.
The page is also visible to those without Facebook accounts through the town web site, www.newglasgow.ca.
Kimberly Dickson, marketing and communications director for the Town of New Glasgow, believes the new medium will be an innovative forum for citizen engagement and an effective tool to advertise the community to a wider audience.
“In 2011, the Town of New Glasgow created Facebook pages for special events, such as Culture Days and Remembrance Day and received a great response and interest in these pages,” she says. “We have been investigating social media options for a little while and, with these successes, decided that the time was right to venture forth with a Facebook page.”
Although staff has been developing and testing the page after a soft launch in November, promotion for it only began in December, she says.
“Since December 9, we have had more active monthly users and we expect that number to climb quickly,” she says. “As of early January we were up to more than 457 monthly active users. Monthly active users are Facebook fans that are considered active if they have engaged with, viewed, or consumed content generated by our Facebook page.”
It’s a new frontier for communication for the town, despite Facebook being a well-established social medium.
As a result the project has been researching Facebook pages serving other Canadian municipalities, as well as pages employed by other levels of government and the private sector.
“It is a work in progress and we want it to be highly effective,” she said. “They are never finished because there is always something to update, or some new technology or technique to implement.”
Recent African Heritage Month activities and Sweater Day posts generated new interest. It was encouraging to have organizations such as the Tourism Industry Association and the Canadian Wildlife Fund like New Glasgow’s Sweater Day postings. The highest group of users are between 18-24 years at 31 per cent, followed by ages 33-44 years at 25 per cent and 17 per cent from the 25-34 years age group.
Janice Hatt, who works on the technical and design aspects of the New Glasgow page and who has much experience in social media as an IT specialist says, “I am pleased with the page because the page stats are climbing. There is daily interaction with the public, comments being posted, posts being shared.”