French Foreign Ministry releases console showcasing Twitter activity

In a move to increase transparency, the French Foreign Ministry (@francediplo) has launched a web dashboard highlighting the French diplomatic network’s activity on Twitter.

Released on February 24, the console encompasses all 101 accounts in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — including ministers, permanent representatives and ministry operators — and is available in French, English, Spanish and Arabic.

“Usually, consoles are designed for internal use; however, we wanted to make this tool available to the public, in the interests of transparency,” said Anne Chounet-Cambas (@AnneChounet), the ministry’s head of digital.

The dashboard supplements the Ministry’s existing lists to give an overview of the activity of the vast and diverse diplomatic network and sheds light on French foreign policy.

We wanted to offer the public a tool that makes our ‘twiplomacy’ accessible at a glance.

Anne Chounet-Cambas@AnneChounet

The console features accounts, followers and Tweets in the French diplomatic network on a global and regional level with detailed stats. It also includes a list of the most followed, retweeted and mentioned accounts, in addition to highlighting the most retweeted photo and showing all the other photos shared in Tweets. Moreover, the dashboard shows the main hashtags used by French diplomats and the most frequently used hashtags in Tweets directed at French diplomats.

“Twitter is particularly interesting for diplomacy,” Chounet-Cambas said, “because it increases awareness of our action in the field. It also allows us to have a direct conversation with users.”

Do you know of other innovative uses of Twitter? Write to mediablog@twitter.com.