Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/653613
20 UCW MARCH 16-22, 2016 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM Does your advertising leave you feeling this way? Advertising can be pretty complex. You may not know which way to turn. ere is a sign you can rely on — ours. Call us today so that our professionals can make the most of your advertising investment. Free Papers Working For You Another sign we're working for you. 484-6200 wwwupandcomingweekly.com City Keeps You Connected On the Go! by KEVIN ARATA The City of Fayetteville works hard to keep its residents informed of services the City provides every day to make Fayetteville a better place to live, work, and play. That means finding new ways to engage our residents using the latest outreach methods and technology. One of the outreach methods we like to use is the numerous social media platforms available to engage with residents. All totaled, we have more than 13,000 followers, subscribers, and fans on our major platforms, which is an effective way to engage with those of you who live on your phones, like so many of us do in these days of information-seeking instant gratification. And those numbers continue to grow as we have placed an increased emphasis on our social media content over the past six months. Facebook. (8,500+ fans) If you have not checked out and liked our Facebook page, we encourage you to do so. We are constantly providing information about City services, City-sponsored events, and things that residents can do here in the City. We also host Facebook town halls on a regular basis to dialogue with residents. Most recently we conducted a town hall for the Parks and Recreation Bond Referendum, and other town hall topics in the past have included red light cameras, police and fire services, transit, and environmental services. Periscope. (349 followers) A new platform we have recently begun to use is Periscope, which is a live stream feed distributed on the Periscope platform, as well as to our Twitter followers. The video broadcasts live, and stays on the Periscope platform for 24 hours before it disappears. We share press releases that are important to residents and showcase things of interest around the community. We encourage you to sign up for a Periscope account and follow us there, and to follow us on Twitter too. Twitter. (4,600+ followers) We've been on Twitter for a while now, as have most municipalities, and have a solid number of followers. We put out news releases, employment opportunities, weather updates, road conditions, parks and information-related information and other interesting facts about the City. Instagram. (205 followers) We've only recently begun to use Instagram, so this platform is relatively new to us. We are always looking for more effective ways to showcase things across the City for our residents. Keep checking back here to see how we expand this platform's capability! Another place where we put a lot of effort to engage with residents is through the use of technology to reach residents who are always on the go. We recently began live-streaming our public access channel and have designed out website for phone and tablet access. Live Streaming of FayTV. Recently we added to the capability to live-stream FayTV, which is the City's public access channel, broadcast on Time Warner Cable's channel 7. So for those of you who don't have TWC, or who desire to follow us remotely, we encourage you to check it out. Go to our website, and on the left side, click on FayTV to access the link to our live stream platform. Mobile-friendly website. We've discussed our new website here before, so I won't detail that again, but what's of note from a technology perspective is that our newly redesigned site is mobile and tablet friendly. While it's not social media, it's still pretty cool for us. Our statistics indicate that more than 38% of our page views originate from mobile or tablet platforms. Before our redesign we averaged about 75,000 page views per month, now we average about 154,000 per month, and it keeps growing. I am very pleased to see so many residents who are reaching out to us to gather information about the City of Fayetteville and dialogue with us. The City is on some other social media platforms as well, besides those listed above. Check out our social media landing page at the bottom of our website for other sites. We like that the increase in accessibility of information at residents' fingertips is helping keep everyone informed in a timely manner. I encourage you all to check out the outreach methods detailed above. If you have suggestions or thoughts on what we can do to improve our communication to the community, I welcome your input! We are here to serve you, the residents. KEVIN ARATA, Corporate Communica ons Director City of Faye eville, Contribu ng Writer. 433 Hay Street Fayetteville, NC 28301-5537 www.FayettevilleNC.gov (910) 433-1FAY (1329) /cityoffayettevillegovernment Insta Join Team Fayetteville! Follow Your City on Social Media: Engaging You About Your City Government Engaging You About Your City Government