Amplifying social media – a case study

County Durham and Darlington FRS (CDDFRS) has been a FireStoppers partner since 2018. In that time, they have gained a lot of experience and insight into getting the best out of their social media messaging. Here’s what they say:

Social media is a fantastic platform that can help you reach a large number of people for free (organically) or, for a small cost, to target specific audiences/communities.

In the initial years, the social media for County Durham and Darlington FRS was solely managed by the central Communications team, but as we learned more about the engagement and reach we were achieving, we looked at doing things differently.

Fire Stations were given the opportunity to push out FireStoppers messages through their individual social media channels; this not only reaches their followers, but also enables them to talk to local groups with a vested interest in protecting their communities.

Certain station pages received more engagement than others, and we found this was due to the high levels of deliberate fires and anti-social behaviour within certain areas of the county, for example, Peterlee. Their station page was able to tap into the community groups outlined below and spread the FireStoppers message far and wide:

This is just one example of an incident posted on one of these pages, and as you can see it reached 11,326 more people than it would have had it just been posted on their central page.

Having done this, County Durham and Darlington has achieved the following results/seen the following benefits:

• Increased community engagement to station pages and the central CDDFRS pages.
• Increased interaction from crews, through creating their own pages and content and connecting more with the central communications team.
• Quick and timely FireStoppers messages being broadcast by crews at the scene as and when incidents are taking place.

Additional FireStoppers posts

Although not the highest reaching post, with a reach of just over 18,000 people, this led to multiple calls into FireStoppers, and we believe actually led to a conviction.

Examples of higher reaching FireStoppers posts

Highest reaching FireStoppers post

CDDFRS’s highest performing FireStoppers related post can be seen below. We have found any incident which involves attacks on firefighters always reaches, and resonates with, a high number of people. This post was around Bonfire Night, where any Service usually sees a rise in attacks/deliberate fires. This post ended up reaching over 54 thousand people.