Department for Transport: Social Media

(asked on 11th March 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Transport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how many officials in (a) his private office and (b) the wider Department have been allocated to the production and promotion of online content for use on social media in (a) 2018-19, (b) 2019-20 and (c) 2020-21.


Answered by
Chris Heaton-Harris Portrait
Chris Heaton-Harris
Secretary of State for Northern Ireland
This question was answered on 19th March 2021

a) No officials in the Secretary of State’s private office are allocated to the production and promotion of online content for use on social media.

b) Resource within the wider department allocated to the production and promotion of online content for use on social media equates to approximately 11.15 Full Time Equivalents (FTE) in 2018/19, 11.4 FTE in 2019/20, and 12.65 FTE in 2020/21.

This resource can be broken down across two main areas, the central Communications team and separate policy and HR teams.

The central Communications team create and promote departmental social media content managing several corporate social media channels as well as some behavioural change campaign channels. For example THINK!, the critical road safety campaign to help reduce deaths and serious injury on roads; and ‘It’s everyone’s journey’ championing equal access on public transport. The number of officials in the central team, working across a range of disciplines including media and digital, equates to approximately 7.15 FTE in 2018/19, 7.4 FTE in 2019/20, and 8.15 FTE in 2020/21

These people are not solely focussed on the production and promotion of online content for social media although it forms the majority of their role alongside channel management, brand and design, accessibility, insight and evaluation and wider social media support including training.

HR and some policy teams across the department also own and manage their own social media channels. The number of officials across HR and the different policy teams equates to approximately 4 FTE in 2018/19 and 2019/20 and 4.5 FTE in 2020/21.



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