Social media and advertising

You asked

Under the Freedom of Information Act I would like to request the following information:

1. Does your organisation have a Facebook Page(s)? If yes, what is/are the url(s) and when were they set up?

2. Does your organisation advertise or spend any money on Facebook? If yes, please can you outline what expenditure has occurred and break down expenditure per calendar year (January to December) since 2004?

3. Does your organisation have a Twitter Account? If yes, what is/are the url(s) and when were they set up?

4. Does your organisation advertise or spend any money on Twitter? If yes, please can you outline what expenditure has occurred and break down expenditure per calendar year (January to December) since 2006?

5. Does your organisation use Google G-Suite services (Google services) or does your organisation rely on google for any services (such as email hosting)? If yes, what are the services, when were they agreed and how much did they cost?

6. Does your organisation advertise or spend any money on Google? If yes, please can you outline what expenditure has occurred and break down expenditure per calendar year (January to December) since the payments first began?

7. Is there an official policy for the use of organisational Facebook or Twitter Accounts (ie how to post, what to use it for and when to delete or preserve records)? If there is a policy (or policies) please may I be provided with them?

We said

hank you for your request. Please find the answers to your questions as follows;

1. Yes: https://en-gb.facebook.com/ONS/. This was set up on 18 May 2011.

2. No.

3. Yes: https://twitter.com/ONS. This was set up in November 2010

4. We have never advertised on Twitter. From 1 April to 11 April 2014 and 15 August 2014 to 31 October 2014, we paid £5,554.08 to Twitter for data for research purposes. The aim of this was to see whether these data could be used to obtain new insights into patterns of internal migration within England and Wales. The data formed the basis of this report 'Using geolocated Twitter traces to infer residence and mobility'. Generally, we do not pay for the supply of data. These costs paid are associated with establishing a supply and/or working in partnership to understand the data.

5. We have a Google Docs licence for our International Team to share Information between other National Statistics Institutes. Apart from that staff are able to use the free services but none are sanctioned as official ONS products nor are they to be used for ONS official business.

6. No.

7. Please see the associated download for the Social Media Policy. These are based on the publicly available social media guidance for civil servants:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/social-media-guidance-for-civil-servants/social-media-guidance-for-civil-servants

and supplemented by our style guidance: https://style.ons.gov.uk/category/social-media/

Some personal information in this document has been withheld under s.40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act.