This Friday 1 November 2013 marks the second global police Tweetathon organised by Lauri Stevens (@lawscomm) over at ConnectedCops.
Police Tweetathon – Take 2
[mks_dropcap style=”squared”]T[/mks_dropcap]he first global police Tweetathon took place this March when over 220 law enforcement agencies took to Twitter to tweet about their work.
The hashtag #poltwt trended from New Zealand west to Australia, across Europe and then from the east coast of North America in a wave across to the west coast.
There were 48,482 tweets in 23 different languages – reaching over 11 million people.
Talking to Lauri on Twitter earlier this week, it looks like the second event is going to beat that baseline with ease.
A glimpse into policing and Twitter styles across the world
[dropcap]J[/dropcap]ust as approaches to policing vary by country, so do law enforcement approaches to the use of social media in general and Twitter in particular.
You’ll find lots of different examples on this site:
- There’s a whole series of posts on the latest use of Twitter by different European police forces
- British forces tend to take a very localised approach, even enlisting members of the public as community reporters
- The Spanish national police force has gathered a huge Twitter following and uses humour to engage members of the public in helping report & solve crimes
- Analysis of the tweets from the 1st global tweetathon gives a good sense of the different approaches across the world
The tweetathon will be a great opportunity for anyone interested in policing to compare different approaches across the world.
No doubt there are plenty of researchers already set up to analyse the tweets.
For convenience, here’s a live feed of the hashtag:
