Deeerfield-News.com-Deerfield Beach,Fl-In today’s world even municipalities need top performing up to date websites and social media accounts.The City of Deerfield Beach has been working hard to assure this.
We started out to do a story on Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing.We stumbled on the fact the City of Deerfield Beach uses Facebook’s advertising program to promote it’s Facebook page. We as a follower of their page noticed they used “Promoted Pages” which is how someone can tell a post is an “Ad.” This caught our attention and curiosity as to why the City would use Facebook’s ad system to promote it’s Facebook page.We inquired about the City of Deerfield’s use of both Facebook and Google adword’s to promote its’s online presence, which is a good thing for our city.
We noticed the City of Deerfield Beach has quite an active Facebook page with over 10.000 Likes and Followers,very impressive! The City of Deerfield Beach official website had 887.5k visitors to the website last fiscal year a very impressive amount of “Unique Visitors” to a website.
When we initially contacted the City of Deerfield Beach for information we at first apparently got lost in the shuffle and took the lack of response the wrong way, as The City of Deerfield had something to hide or for whatever reason would not turn over public information to us.We contacted our commisioner elect and our new Mayor both were very responsive and I wish to thank Mayor Ganz personally for his following up on this and helping us get to the right person and the information!
The City of Deerfield Beach has done a good job and is working hard to improve and update all of it’s online presence from www.Deerfield-Beach.com,also buying the domain DFB.City.The City of Deerfield Beach has a user friendly website with good and current information.The website also has underwater cam hooked up to it’s very informative website which allows visitors to view the ocean live under Deerfield Beaches famous fishing pier.
The following were a few questions we asked to The City of Deerfield Beach about it’s online presence.
I have a few questions about the Facebook and Google
1- How much did the city spend in 2016 in Google advertising for Deerfield-beach.com? $0
2-How many unique visitors does Deerfield-beach.com get either monthly or yearly? From Oct.1, 2015 – September 31, 2016 (which is our fiscal year) we had about 887.5k visitors to the website.
3 How much did the city spend on SEO/SEM/SMM in 2016? $0 this is a project we are looking at tackling in FY2017-2018
4-How much did the city spend on Facebook advertising in 2016? Less than $500
Anything you and or the city would like to add I will be glad to publish.
When I arrived in Deerfield Beach in December of 2013 there was not a single social media platform in place, the website was outdated and non-user-friendly. Four years later we have a solid Facebook presence, we are building our Twitter and Instagram audiences (which are the most recent platforms), our media center is housed on Youtube and we have an updated, user-friendly website (www.DFB.City) that is currently experiencing more traffic than previous years. But there is more work to be done, that work includes better analytics (ours are very basic right now) and search engine optimization. My team will be digging in this new fiscal year to implement those practices.
Social Media isn’t going anywhere and this is the way most Deerfield Beach residents are looking for their information and communicating. In fact, our new Mayor Bill Ganz has been a huge proponent of our social media platforms. He has his very own Facebook page (Mayor Bill Ganz), his own Twitter handle (@DFB_MayorGanz) and has just created @DFB_Alerts on Twitter. The new alerts handle on Twitter is to notify residents of BSO-related incidents that are impacting the public. He has a big vision for expanding our communications reach and is one of the most innovative leaders that our City has ever seen!
The answers were provided by Rebecca Medina Stewart The City of Deerfield Beach Director of Public Affairs & Marketing.
Thank You Very Much Rebecca for your help!!!
