The City of Fort St. John has launched a Facebook page and a Twitter account.

It’s been an excellent response, said City human resources manager Grace Fika of the 276 who were fans of the page as of Wednesday morning.

The page launched on Monday morning and there were 228 fans to the Facebook page by 9 a.m. on Tuesday.

It’s not just one department within the City that’s responsible for the Facebook page, there’s someone from every single department to answer questions posted on the page. Fika said questions will be responded to daily.

“If we get a question or comment from someone in regards to something at public works, it doesn’t make much sense for the Visitor Info Centre to do a whole bunch of research,” said Fika.

"We do have, across the organization, administrators from each department that will be able to respond to comments and questions and make sure the information that’s getting out is correct.”

With such a wide age range of City workers, it was some people’s first time using Facebook.

There was a concern about how much extra time it would take for workers to be paying attention to the page, but Fika said it hasn’t been that significant and they do have parameters set in place.

“We do have an Internet and computer protocol, it’s not like our staff are going to be sitting and playing on Facebook.”

Right now the page has job postings, an idea forum for what residents would like to see, an events calendar and photos. Fika said one day it may be a good place to use for some of the emergency management services through Facebook and Twitter as a supplement to Text Alert.

A really useful tool for the City is that they can track demographics and information about the people that are using the page. Graphic designer Jessica Harrison used Facebook ads before the page was launched and said it really helped get the word out there.

“It’s a great response to our Family Fun in the Sun [Week], we advertised on there as well as HR advertising. We can reach a broad audience without being in every local paper in every local town,” she said.

Though Facebook has been around for about six years now, Fika said “local governments have been a little bit slower jumping on the bandwagon. There’s a lot of municipalities across B.C. that sign on in the last two years.”

Fika said though she uses Facebook at home to connect with her family, she never though of it as a work application.

“Then when you start finding out about the behind the scenes what you can do, you [can] track who's coming, the demographics...we do have a young community,” she said, adding that younger City staff members had asked why there’s been no Facebook page.

“It’s been probably a little bit overdue, but we’re there now.”

Fika has been monitoring other municipal government Facebook pages and they have been adding to the City of Fort St. John page since July, though it only launched on Monday.

Whenever possible, the Facebook page will steer users to the City’s actual website. Fika said it’s a supplement to the City’s communication strategy.

“There’s all sorts of way that we can engage people through this type of media and going into the strategic planning process in the future, that might be one of our methods for getting information back from the public.”

Fika set her personal goal to have 1,000 fans of the Facebook page by the end of the week.