The Foreign Office on Twingly

You may not have heard much of Twingly , but I’m happy to help change that in some small way. Twingly is, basically, a blog search engine with faceted, social search for the blogosphere. And if that’s a bit geeky and doesn’t mean much, then the traffic impresses – they tell us it currently serves over 25m searches a month, and over 200m views through its blogstream offering. So it has an audience.

For the Foreign Office, Twingly offers another small step in our attempts to get our content distributed as widely as possible. While we think that our blogs , for example, can, at their best, give a valuable insight into the work that we do and the policies that drive it, we’re perfectly well aware that people just tend not to visit a .gov.uk website. They just don’t, not unless they have to.

So, as we’ve shown before, we’re interested in anything which can act as a carrier for our content (Facebook , YouTube , Flickr ,Twitter … ) . And Twingly’s success in Europe, connecting the blogosphere and driving traffic and engagement through blogs makes it an obvious conduit.

So we’ve launched a Foreign Office channel on Twingly , taking the feeds from our bloggers, who will write about what they always write about: the working life of a jobbing diplomat, and the motivations, thoughts and policies behind that.

It’s nothing fancy (and its free), but it acts as another way to bring our blogs to people’s attention. It dresses up the feed , but also shows who has tweeted the content and gives us another channel for engagement (likes and comments), which we will be looking at. It’s not a big drama (Twingly are nice people to deal with), but it might mean that more people understand more about us, in a different environment and can connect with us in a different way.

Have a look www.twingly.com/fco sign up, let me know what you think…