Was Bruton a media hype? Part two, social media

My background is digital marketing, social media included, so this is the part of the question I set out in part one that I am best placed to answer. What struck me most about Bruton was the sheer number of Facebook groups for a town that size.

The original Bruton page was the one I enjoyed most, because its posts were driven by quality rather than quantity. That is unusual and it is mostly down to whoever is moderating.

Bruton Underground was the other one worth knowing about, set up for community posting and discussion, and describing itself as the antidote to online toxicity, for people who prefer positivity and abundance and, most importantly, no vulgarity. Whether a small town needs an underground network of any kind is a separate question.

There was also the South Somerset Circle page, which covered Wincanton, Bruton and Castle Cary together rather than separately. That idea became a post of its own. That felt like the more useful shape.

Why the tone matters

I am one for positivity in local communities, and I do not mean that as a slogan. Vulgarity and abuse in a town group do one thing: they divide people who will still be living next door to each other afterwards.

A local page with a good tone becomes the place people go for information, which means it becomes the place a business can usefully be mentioned. A bad-tempered one empties out, and the information goes back to being passed between the people who already know each other.

It is also worth remembering that social media is not the whole picture. What a town thinks about itself is shaped by national and local press as much as by its own groups, and those two things feed each other.

First published in October 2017. Edited since: the original promised a third part on national and local media outlets, which was never written, so that trailer has been removed rather than left as a dead promise.