Tuesday, October 07, 2014

Oakham police celebrate 2000 followers on twitter







PC 1312 Joe Lloyd, Beacon Officer for the Oakham and 
Barleythorpe Safer Neighbourhood Team and the officer 
behind the @OakhamPolice twitter account, is celebrating 
the 2000th follower to the account.


Leicestershire Police have a strong social media presence 
including 25 facebook accounts, and over 90 twitter accounts 
with a combined following of over 170,000. 
The accounts cover a broad range of areas of police business 
including neighbourhood policing, traffic, air support, and even 
police dog Drake has an account with over 2000 followers!

The @OakhamPolice account has one of the largest number of 
followers of all of the neighbourhood police accounts in Leicestershire 
and at the time of writing has 2030 followers. PC Lloyd said;

“I have found that social media, in particular twitter has become 
an effective tool to help communicate with the local community as 
well as finding out information from other police forces about new 
ways of working.

“About two years ago we had about 500 followers and it has been 
great to see the account grow to where it is now. I pride myself on 
engaging with the followers and I answer queries and where necessary 
challenge attitudes.

“Twitter does not replace conventional out on the streets policing, 
and I am often able to provide updates as I go about my day to day work. 
“After I had achieved 500 followers it was near Christmas, and I made a 
challenge to social media users to help us get to 750 followers. 
I said that if it was achieved I would dress as Santa Claus for the day 
and at the time PCSO (now PC) Jay COOPER agreed to dress as an Elf!


"The Chief Constable saw our tweets and helped us achieve our 
goal and I dressed as Santa and went to a local school for children 
with disabilities and became their Santa. I have now made this a 
regular event for the school and others, which I find extremely 
rewarding and emotional.”

The police at Rutland have a facebook page and four twitter accounts. 
You can find more information about them by visiting these links;




Inspector Lou Cordiner: http://www.twitter.com/rutlandlpu


Oakham and Barleythorpe Police: http://www.twitter.com/OakhamPolice 



Rutland North and Rutland South http://www.twitter.com/RutlandPolice




I have 2177 catch me if you can PC Lloyd!! :-)