India releases social media strategy draft

Sunday, 20 May 2012

Citizen Engagement

By Xinghui Guo | 13 September 2011

The Department of Information Technology has released a draft social media strategy for the India government, providing a basic framework and guidelines for use of social media by agencies.

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The Framework & Guidelines for Use of Social Media for Government Organisation hopes to help the government enhance its outreach, engage and interact with the 84 per cent of Indian internet users on sites such as Facebook, Orkut and Twitter.

Orkut now has 18 million indian users while Facebook has 17 million and Twitter has 4.5 million but is “rapidly spreading in India”.

“These sites offer an opportunity to reach out to this audience at a key stroke,” states the paper.

“Social networking sites have emerged as a strong platform for interaction between the people. But, government officers are still not using them to seek public opinion on various government’s policies and projects due to lack of certain policy for the same,” said Shankar Aggarwal, Additional Secretary, Department of Information Technology (DIT).

“As this kind of platform can be a best tool for the purpose, we are considering development of such platform with a policy framework for the same in due course.”

DIT has suggested that social media, apart from communicating information and gathering feedback, can also be used to gather “direct feedback on the issues from the common man” for policy making purposes.

The strategy suggests that Facebook Pages must be updated at least a couple of times a week and Twitter, “slightly more frequently”.

Ideally, none of the sites should be left more than a week or two without new content, advised the strategy.