When false 999 calls are the story, tell it on Twitter

West Midlands Police tweeted around the clock earlier this month to let the public and journalists know, in dramatic style, that only one in 20 of the 999 calls they receive are genuine. Communications manager Hilary Hopker, who took part in a recent Digital News Day hosted by the BBC College of Journalism and BBC Birmingham, describes how one force is upping its game on Facebook and Twitter:

Facebook is nine years old this month. If it were a child its parents would be wondering just what sort of secondary school could handle such a popular and sociable pupil. Yet, to experience its first pimples and undoubted teenage anguish over its relationship status, it's almost frightening how something so young is now such a big part of the lives of so many.

Facebook is also back where it began for West Midlands Police more than four years ago. At a time when all your friends were begging you to join Facebook, like it was a party you really had to be at, and you signed up to discover friends old and new already there, only a handful of police forces were even thinking about 'being on Facebook'.

A couple of weeks ago I checked out the number of ‘likes’ for every police force in the UK. Every one of them, more than 50 in total, has a Facebook page, although the number of likes varies wildly from force to force. We rank around 13th, which is good but, as one of the largest UK forces, featuring in the top five would feel better.

So what happened? I recall standing in front of a room full of senior police officers just before the birth of our Facebook page. I explained that if we wanted to be part of our community we had to go to them - not wait for them to come to us. And where was our community these days, or most often these evenings, night after night? On Facebook.

It is to the force's credit that it grasped the importance of this early on and agreed to take part in the social media revolution. So we set up our site and watched as, at 3,000 likes, it rapidly became the most popular police Facebook site in the UK. We felt rightly proud. So, after nearly five years, how have we slipped from that top spot?

Well, if Facebook is a nine-year-old child then Twitter is its louder, brasher, chattier sibling - impossible to ignore. We were compelled, once we had established a social media presence with Facebook and YouTube, to start a Twitter account.

And Twitter suits us. Like us it's a 24/7 operation - immediate, reactive, responsive. It likes hard news, and hard news is our business.

Also, our main resource is our staff: people who need to be close to their communities - not just be where they are but to have multiple conversations with them. Twitter allows us to do that well.

Earlier this month we tweeted for 24 hours from our call centre (pictured above). Only 5% of our 999 calls are a genuine emergency, so we decided to share some of the 95% that aren’t.

Among them on that particular shift were calls from people who wanted a refund for an expensive car wash, to report a spiritual healer for fraud, to complain about British Gas, and to get their laptop fixed.

One young boy requested officers to come out and frighten his sister. There were also a lot of 999 calls from children and babies playing with mobile phones.

We tweeted about them all, and about more productive calls from observant members of the public that night which enabled us to give chase and apprehend criminals.

It was a window on our daily life that we don't often open, and the public and the media loved it.

Unsurprisingly, radio stations including BBC Radio WM and Radio 1 picked up the story because we had handy pre-audio prepared for them to use. The local papers also ran it, as did BBC News Online. Due to the quirky nature of the calls, we also gained live pieces on Sky News, a slot on ITV Central and a feature on Daybreak.

The re-tweets are continuing even now.

It’s easy to sometimes forget just how interesting what we do every day is to other people.

In terms of numbers, that tweet-a-thon gained us more than 10,000 extra followers - more followers than we picked up during the 2010 riots. It’s good to know that we can capture such interest without a major disaster. Our main Twitter feed, @WMPolice, now has nearly 70,000 followers.

So, back to Facebook. Since Christmas we have decided to love Facebook a little more; give it more attention. Keen to treat it differently from Twitter - it sits in what people tell us is a very personal space - we try to make it kind and friendly. It gives you some good advice from someone who has been there and shares photos - the life blood of Facebook interaction. People love our 'pet' dogs!

And that's starting to work too. Our likes have increased from a steady 3% to 9% for last month. We may not be the most popular person at the Facebook 'party' yet, but we are there and it's as important today as it was when we started to be in the room. 

Read tips from BBC journalists on how they use social media