THUNDER BAY – Terrace Bay, Ignace, Nipigon, Red Rock and Schreiber are Facebook superstars. Five of the top ten communities in the “most liked” category on Facebook are from Northwestern Ontario. The use of social media is growing, but only 41% of the communities are using social media according to Redbrick.ca.
Facebook Stars
In Terrace Bay, Carmelo Notarbartolo, Chief Administrative Officer comments, “We want our youth and community engagement, so we are committed to our social media strategy”. Notarbartolo credits the leadership from Council, and the youthful spirit of the Terrace Bay team to their engagement level. The CAO comments, “I was 33 when I started, and two of the five members of the management team are under that age now”.
Mayor King states, “It is a pretty high priority for us, and we make sure it is updated daily.”
Terrace Bay has completed a full re-branding of the community, and social media engagement is critical in that process.
“This is great news for Terrace Bay to be seeing the results,” commented Notarbartolo.
“For smaller communities, getting information out quickly is critical,” states Mayor King “Print and television are more heavily production oriented, radio can be really fast, but Social Media is very fast”.
Twitter Superstars Ottawa Toronto and Nipigon
Ottawa and Toronto are topping the charts as Twitter Superstars. Part of that is based on the sizes of the communities, and part is that both Ottawa and Toronto are centres of political power and engagement.
“Nipigon takes a simple, manageable approach to social media. We post relevant, informative and interesting pieces twice a day to Facebook and Twitter and use free measurement tools to understand our audience. We figured out what worked best, we stuck to it, and our following grew over time,” comments Charmaine McCraw, Economic Development Officer, Township of Nipigon.
The groundwork for the social media efforts in Nipigon were started by former EDO Sarah Lewis who has now moved on to works in Calgary.
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