Social media is changing the way we communicate. If Facebook were a country, it’d be the third largest in the world. YouTube is the second largest search engine on the web. 90% of people trust peer recommendations they read on sites like Yelp. More than 64 million tweets are sent out each day. Kindergarteners are learning on iPads.

And many times, people are talking about their local government on social media. If this is where your citizens are talking about you, shouldn’t you be a part of that conversation?

Monday’s session, “The Business Case and Content Strategies for Social Media,” gave some practical tips on how local governments can get involved or improve their social media efforts. The session was led by Susan Mays, Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Initiatives at CH2M Hill; Spencer Stern of Stern Consulting, and Sean Stegall, City Manager of Elgin, Illinois.

Providing multiple communication channels through social media allows constituents to interact with your local government in a way they are most comfortable. It allows you to engage your citizens and frame the conversation. It also helps you deliver measureable results, improve transparency, and even cut costs.

Here are some tips from the session:

• Create a social media team at your organization. Identify the right personnel, preferably those that are already adept at social media. And cast a wide net. Have someone on your team from marketing, legal, finance, IT, etc. Include all age groups.
• Align social media goals with your organization’s mission and objectives
• Develop an organization-wide social media policy. The shorter the better. But the policy should include security, legal issues, sunset laws, FOIA issues/open records complaints, employee access, account management, and consistency of messaging.
• Post fresh content daily or weekly.
• Take negative comments in stride—use it as an opportunity to explain your position or mission
• Make sure social media is being used to drive people to your events.
• Multimedia is a must—use photos and videos
• Track return on engagement, such as increase in the number of followers and likes, the number and tone of comments (negative and positive), and brand awareness.
• Some free tools that you track social media engagement include Hootsuite, Seesmic, Google Alerts, or Google Trends.

Check out this national study on which cities are the best at social media.