VTA Social Media Campaign to attract feedback on the 2025 Draft Transit Service Plan

Target Audience: The target audiences for this campaign were current VTA riders, potential riders, and countywide residents more broadly. VTA collects public input about transit service year-round. However, many riders are unaware that VTA has a dedicated period where feedback is needed to assess the impact of potential service changes for the upcoming year. The campaign aimed to highlight proposed service changes for VTA's annual transit service plan. Secondarily, it aimed to promote awareness of community engagement opportunities while educating the public on the process of developing annual transit service plans.

Strategy Objective:Our campaign strategy was to visually showcase proposed service changes, highlight engagement opportunities, creatively illustrate the process, and create an open discussion. Tactics included using social media poll features across channels (Nextdoor, X & Instagram) to gauge interest in types of community outreach events; hosting a social media Q&A event with VTA transportation planners via Instagram stories, where followers submitted questions on proposed service changes and transit-related inquiries; developing humorous short-form videos to illustrate the plan development process. Analytics have shown us this type of content tends to be shared with more of our non-followers. By taking advantage of this algorithmic tendency, we were able to reach a larger audience.

Situation Challenge: Every year VTA has a period of engagement where we need to solicit community feedback for our draft annual transit service plan for the upcoming year. As ridership continues to recover following the pandemic, this year's draft annual transit service plan highlighted changes to frequency and hours of operation and featured a robust community outreach plan. We launched a social media campaign to amplify the proposed changes with secondary objectives to increase awareness and education of how VTA co-creates its annual transit service plans with the community we serve.

Results Impact: In total, our social media campaign racked up the following organic statistics 128,869 Reach - All Platforms 11,525 Views on Reels - Instagram Only 325 Total Shares - All Platforms 279 Social Media Poll Responses - Nextdoor, X, IG This resulted in over 100 public comments submitted for the draft annual transit service plan compared to last year's annual transit service plan which only received about 10 comments. That's a 10-fold increase. As a result of the feedback gathered, we made revisions to the final plan including keeping service on a route originally planned to be cut down, increasing service on a popular route, and deferring changes that had negative sentiment.

Why Submit: "This is legit amazing. Understood the entire process through cats," an Instagram user commented in reference to the reel of VTA developing transit service plans for the county. Transit service planning is very complicated but educating the community we serve and inspiring them to engage with us shouldn't be. This campaign involved using simplified language and graphics, as well as familiar social media trends to connect with the community in a way that makes sense to them. As a public agency, we are here to serve them after all. The high engagement seen on campaign posts (likes, shares, saves) relative to our typical organic engagement rate illustrates that the content resonated with users and piqued an interest to get involved.