Lockyer Valley Regional Council has seen impressive social media engagement results since creating, and posting, graphics to share disaster warnings across the community.
Due to the region’s significant weather challenges in the past months, the Council’s Communication Team worked to develop the social media presence.
The social media tiles were first developed for the community’s November 2021 weather event and have continued to evolve throughout the 2022 events.
Lockyer Valley Regional Council Mayor Cr Tanya Milligan said the use of a themed graphic has proven a worthy engagement tool.
“The team brainstormed and decided a themed graphic would be the best way to draw attention to the post while people were scrolling through their feeds,” Mayor Milligan said.
“We soon found engagement on the social posts with the tiles were higher than the usual text-based post with the theming generating greater awareness of the importance of the posts,” Mayor Milligan said.
“Following our Corporate Style Guide, eye-catching colours and photos relevant to the content of the post were chosen and then designed.”
The tiles are used specifically for disaster-related ‘Weather Updates’ or ‘Recovery Updates’, with the team intentionally not utilising them too much to ensure their effectiveness remains.
The tiles featured an easy-to-read call to action for the community, under themes of:
- Be prepared
- Weather warning
- Weather alert
- Weather awareness
- Recovery update
In the most recent weather event, the colours were tweaked to represent a specific message including:
- Red and Black
- Urgent messages – relocation, sandbags, evacuations
- Purple
- Awareness messages – stay-up-to date, places of shelter, gauges
- Yellow
- Traffic Updates – bridge and road closures
- Blue
- General messaging – patience, stay safe, essential items, preservation,
- Green
- Recovery
Council’s CEO, Ian Church, said the social media engagement statistics were impressive.
“Given the population of the Lockyer Valley region is around 42,000, several of the posts in both the November and February event are providing a reach of eight times our population at 330,000 – which is considerable,” Mr Church said.
“Neighbouring councils have acknowledged the effectiveness of our Disaster Tiles with plans to tweak the tiles to their own LGAs as necessary, so it is a wonderful achievement for our small team to be a leader in this space.”
