Wednesday, 26 February 2025

How Much? Barnet Council wasting money on staff to post pointless tweets & Facebook posts

Doge for Barnet!

Yesterday, I wrote this blog about how Barnet Council, who have just had a £55 Million baleout from the Government are wasting your money. I didn't post it as Tuesday is food blog day. Today, just as I was about to post it. To my amazement, I saw this post

Now, for once, it was a useful, sensible tweet, with an important message that directly affects Barnet voters in the forthcoming Barnet By Election. All good? Well not really. Anyone who knows anything about Social media (such as Barnet Council's paid staff) should know that a single post is nowhere near enough. They should have been tweeting this message out ever since the Byelection was announced. They should have been asking us to retweet it and let our friends know. I would have amplified this message more if I'd seen it earlier. What is shocking is that our local parties have not retweeted it. Anyway, on with the text I'd written. I think this rather amplifies the point though........

On Monday,  Barnet Council posted this tweet. A council that has just applied for a £55 Bale out wants to give away money for a Festival of Architecture. I am sorry to say, but if I was going to pick any London Borough to celebrate in the London Festival of Architecture, Barnet would be the last one. The list of buildings of note that we've lost in the last 20 years is something beyond comprehension. A few iconic ones? The National Institute for Medical Research (replaced with a bad Barratts knock off copy). The National Newspaper Library in Mill Hill. Countless interesting pubs,  houses, shops etc have been gutted, demolished and ruined. And the new buildings. Anonymous, dull structures in Colindale, etc. 

So this is what they tweeted. 

This was also posted to Facebook. .

It's bad enough that they are doling money out, but they are paying staff to do this. As best I could see, this was the only social media post on Monday. 

I've been monitoring Barnet Council tweets etc for a while. I was interested to find out how much effort they were putting into their tweeting and what sort of response they were getting. FYI when I looked on Monday, the tweet above had around 300 views and no engagement. I sent an FoI request and got this answer

Thank you for your request received on 9 January 2025, for the following information: 1. Details of the number of members of staff engaged on maintaining Barnet Council social media accounts 2. The average number of hours that these members of staff spend per day on social media accounts for the last month where figures are readily available 3. If available, the time spent by platform 4. Any targets etc that staff may have for numbers of posts etc We have processed this request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. 

Response I am writing to inform you that we have searched our records and although we hold some of the information requested, some of the information you requested is not held by London Borough of Barnet. We have provided answers to your request below. 

1. Details of the number of members of staff engaged on maintaining Barnet Council social media accounts 1 X News & Social Media Manager, 2 X News & Social Media Officers 

2. The average number of hours that these members of staff spend per day on social media accounts for the last month where figures are readily available Rotates between the team 2-3 hours per working day for the individual on duty 

3. If available, the time spent by platform Information not recorded 

4. Any targets etc that staff may have for numbers of posts etc No targets for posts; annual evaluation assesses posts' performance with reach and engagement metrics

So to produce these tweets etc takes 2-3 hours a day. There is no monitoring of what the staff do and no targets. I wrote to Barry Rawlings, leader of the council and the Tory opposition leader, Peter Zinkin. I got no response from Cllr Rawlings. 

Here is the email I sent.

Dear Councillors

 

FYI  - Do you think this is a sensible usage of council resources? Are you happy with the way the success of engagement is being evaluated.

A few observations. The council's twitter feed has a following of approx 35K accounts. Many will be news organisations etc. This represents less than 10% of Barnets population. As best I can tell, posts get an average of around 300 view, which is less than 0.1 of the population. The recent Holocaust memorial being an outlier with 11K views, but still only acheived 11 likes and 4 retweets. 

 

To me, this looks like a very ineffective use of resources.

Here is Councillor Zinkins response (that i it in it's entirity)

as you say almost a complete waste of time
Regards


Cllr Peter Zinkin

I have long found Councillor Zinkin to be one of the more sensible and approachable Tory members. Although brief, his response does seem to confirm this assessment. 

These officers also post on the Barnet Council website. The news section has 1-2 posts a week on average. They also produce a weekly newsletter called Barnet First, which allededly has 45,000 subscribers. This means approx 15% of the people who live in the Borough subscribe. Most of the stories appear in several editions and are generally a rehash of the stories in the news section. You can see the newsletters here and sign up (I'd urge all Barnet residents to do this, you are paying for it!).

Given that there are a full time team of two staff and a manager doing all this, I can only say that it is appalling. The home page is as bland and dull as possible. There are no previews of what is in the newsletters on the homepage, which is also difficult to find. The actual Newsletters are laid out in the most boring way possible. There is no attempt at all to engage with the audience, no "What's in this edition" at the top. No thought given to what might encourage readers to read the whole thing. 

To sum up. I'm all for engagement with the public. I'm all for putting information out there on social media. What I am not all for is wasting taxpayers money in a totally incompetent way. Do it properly or don't do it. On Monday, I wrote a slightly tongue in cheek blog about Elon Musk and DOGE. I am sure Mr Musk would have something to say about this, if he were interested in Barnet. 

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