What do you want to hear from us?

Last July I started as the first Head of Social Media with INTERPOL and with the objective to practice what I preach - putting social back into social media. One of the first projects was to ask our followers what they wanted to hear from us, since they are our biggest focus group.

It’s the most exciting project since putting the World Economic Forum on Twitter back in 2007. Here are some of the most successful initiatives we launched over the past four months:

Community Management

We created a bespoke @Police page on LinkedIn which, we hope will attract police officers and law enforcement agents worldwide.

We are building a Police Community on X where we have a public community of 17 national police organisations. You never know when this group will come in handy.

We created private Direct Message groups on X with 90+ national police organisations and 40+ Interior Ministries and Home Affairs. The reactions in both groups have been phenomenal and the plan is to create DM groups with journalists.

We created a Close Friends group with law enforcement agencies and Interior Ministries on Instagram which is a powerful one-way messaging tool.

Police Cooperation & Collaborations

Our powerful video for the #IdentifyMe campaign received a massive boost especially on Instagram as we invited the Belgian, Dutch, French, Italian and Spanish police to collaborate on the Reel .

On September 7, the International Day of Police Cooperation, our collaborative anniversary video has become one of the most watched videos on our channels with more than 90,000 unique views.

We also engineered a police thread on X with 12 police organisations posting their mottos to illustrate #PoliceCooperatiom.

Engaging our Followers

We asked our followers what they wanted to hear from us on each platform and were pleasantly surprised by the many constructive comments and suggestions we received.

We started engaging our followers with regular InterPolls on Instagram, LinkedIn and X.

Our Instagram albums showcasing international police cooperation at the Paris 2024 Olympics have generated some of our best engagement.

Our Instagram Reels have reached 1.75 million users over the past four months, all organically.

Putting ‘social’ back into social media

We started acknowledging comments by liking positive reactions. A small ‘heart’ will go a long way to engage our fans.

We opened Direct Messages to anyone on X and started replying to private messages on Facebook and Instagram . Automatic replies help us manage hundreds of messages we receive each day. We are happy to report that we are now on top of our digital inboxes.

New Channels

We created a Flickr account, sharing our pictures with the global public.

We activated our Threads account and started engaging with our partners .

We have a burgeoning presence on Bluesky where the audience is mainly Brazilian since X was banned in the country.

We have opened a channel on TikTok and a public page on Snapchat mainly to reserve our name and are working to produce engaging video content.

And finally, we launched a BeReal account where I shared pictures of my camera-shy colleagues. The page has attracted more than 24,000 followers in the first six weeks.

We are welcoming our new Secretary General next week and I have some ideas which would revolutionize executive communications. #StayTuned and follow INTERPOL .

And finally, a big thank you to my colleagues Sofia Léo Moreira and Nicola Vigilanti ??