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Tag - Social Media

#AskMR Twitter Q&A with the President

The second Q&A via the Presidents twitter account @PresRajapaksa was held yesterday evening (25th September) from New York. The first such twitter Q&A was held in June, where questions were answered by Pres. Sec. Mr. Lalith Weerthunga. On this occasion the President answered the questions while Mr. Weeratunga moderated the session.

Questions were requested to be UN related, although they came from a various range of topics. During the Q&A session(which got delayed due to another meeting of the President)  around 20 questions were answered. However in contrast to the previous twitter session, the questions weren’t retweeted, which meant it was a bit difficult to find which question was actually answered. At the end of the session, the social media team acknowledged this mistake, and promised to improve future sessions.

If you by any chance missed the session you can take a look at the twitter stream below.

#AskMR Twitter Q&A with President Rajapaksa

Twitter in Sri Lanka through the years

Twitter has always played a giant role in Sri Lanka’s social media scene. With only a handful of Sri Lankans a few years back, Twitter has now grown to tens of thousands of tweeps from all over the country tweeting their thoughts away.

At first were the geeks. Those who always try to keep up with the technology and test out new things. Along came the bloggers from both English and Sinhala blogospheres. It was a place for them to promote their content, meet fellow tweeps with common interests and discuss everything happening around.

Organizing committee of the first ever TweetupSL (Image source)

One of the earliest milestones of the Sri Lankan Twitter community was the first ever TweetupSL. A tweetup is in fact a gathering of tweeps. Friends you make in your twitter stream meeting in real life, face to face. The event took place in 2010 in Coco Veranda, one of the first Sri Lankan businesses to have a commendable presence on Twitter.

Some of the attendees at TweetupSL 2 (Image source)

Since then, two more TweetupSL happened in 2011 and 2012 respectively, each with far more success than the previous ones. The community has grown in leaps and bounds. More businesses joined Twitter and several big events were organized in the twittersphere. Mini tweetups, hashtag nights became a common occurrence. Not to forget all the lovers who first met on Twitter. 🙂

Twitter Q&A with the Secretary to the President

For those of you who missed it, the first Q&A via the Presidents twitter account was held on Wednesday. Even though the questions were answered through the official @PresRajapaksa account, it was actually the Secretary to the President, Mr Lalith Weeratunga who took up the questions.

The questions were submitted through the #AskLW hashtag in all three languages, and Mr. Weeratunga started right on schedule. Each question was retweeted and then answered, so that both questions and answers are visible in an orderly manner. Around 20 questions were answered in topics from political, to personal to paypal.

Even though there were questions unanswered (Understandably due to the busy schedule of Mr. Lalith Weeratunga), this is a good start to social media engagement from the government. And hopefully will be the first of many more such Q&As.  Also in a subsequent release, Mr Weeratunga has stated that more answers would be provided in the coming days via twitter.

You can check out the Q&A on twitter below. And to check on all the questions, just search for #Asklw.

Twitter feed Asklw

Social Media Statistics 2013

Found this very informative infographic on Social Media in 2013 covering Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest. Surprised that 25% of users still neglect privacy settings, while 5 million images per day from instagram is an insane amount of images. Check out the rest of the facts down below.

2013-social-media-stats