CorpComms Magazine

It took seven days after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion on 20 April for BP to send out a tweet about its position or efforts to control the spill.

The tweets that followed were firstly just tiny URL links to technical updates. There was no humane face to their twitter account at that time. This served to give more fodder to the parody Twitter site @BPGlobalPR, which tweeted humorous and sarcastic updates. This twitter feed also had more than 188,000 followers compared to 18,000 for BP.

More importantly, BP did not even own the twitter handle @BP (it belongs to an early adopter called Bryan Pendleton) and had to settle for @BP_America, further hampering its ability to counter negative backlash.

On 2 May, almost two weeks after the spill, entering 'BP oil spill' into YouTube returned more than 400 videos about the disaster, from news reports to angry members of the public.

The official YouTube channels of Louisiana senators Mary Landrieu and David Vitter posted their remarks as did President Obama. The one voice that was conspicuously missing was that of BP itself: it did not join YouTube and post videos until 18 May.

It was also reported that more than 350 negative Facebook groups had been created, the most popular being 'Boycott BP' which has more than 800,000 fans.

Following its initial mistakes BP has made a more concerted effort to engage with social media. The oil giant began posting interviews with chief executive Tony Hayward on YouTube, along with other videos explaining their actions. A live feed with graphics showing how they were trying to stop the oil leaking was also established, attracting hundreds of thousands of views.

Within two months, BP had begun tweeting ten or more times a day and regularly updated its Facebook page. It does not censor criticism or insults and only removes posts that contain abusive or offensive language.

The BP America Facebook page has a number of individuals who hold very differing views and often argue through posting comments to a particular story. One man who lives in Florida appears in almost every feed of comments to the wall.

One year on BP is still coming under criticism for not engaging people in dialogue and only using its social media channels to broadcast messages and provide updates.

Click here to read our feature on BP: One year on

Click here and scroll down to read six columnists' comments, one year since the crisis

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