What Liberal Democrat HQ does centrally when it comes to digital campaigning certainly matters. What the rest of us locally or unofficially, matters even more.

That’s because the vast majority of Liberal Democrat digital channels (websites, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) are run by someone outside party HQ. For each one HQ-run channel there are hundreds, in some cases even thousands, of equivalents run by people in the party outside HQ. Local parties, councillors, Assembly members, keen supporters and more.

What’s more, although the headline audience figures for the HQ channels are high, all the data I’ve seen points towards the bulk of the engagement also happening in those non-HQ channels.

For example, I spend about 15 minutes a day on average running the Liberal Democrat Newswire Facebook page. The statistics for the last week show that for every two engagements the official party page received, my LDN page received one. Thankfully this shows in part I know what I’m doing, being able to generate half the party’s central level of engagement on 15 minutes a day (and about £12 in advertising spending). But more importantly, it shows how much the Liberal Democrat online impact is about what all the rest of us can do too.

This is a point I was recently reminded of when I saw a reasonably made point about how we all could do better regarding use of hashtags. Where I would reach a slightly different conclusion though is not in concluding, ‘so HQ should change what it does’ but rather in ‘so how can we all do better’?

Here’s one way to help do just that – and if you’re within reasonable travel time of London and would like me to come do some training with your local party do let me know.