How Social Media is helping to bring more water and wildlife to our creeklands ...

Over the past decade or so, we have all learned of the impact on our daily lives, both positive and negative, of ‘social media’. Some hate it! Others love it!

In reality, for our non-profit association, Visions for Armidale Creeklands, social media are helping a lot. Eventually, we are confident it will help bring more water and wildlife back to our creeklands.

How so?

On our Facebook page, many members of the community have chosen to ‘Like’ our posts; pleasingly, no-one has made negative comments. This gives us confidence that our messages are gradually getting ‘out there’. Over the past year, the number of people who ‘Like’ our page has grown by 45% - so each time we post, we are reaching more across our community. Typically, our posts reach 1,000 people or more. Our most successful post to date reached some 7,000 people!

More recently, we have started our Instagram page where we have posted images of water that we dream of. When we posted an image of punting on the river in Cambridge UK, we were delighted to discover that the Armidale Rowing Club was interested - who knew?

It’s early days as we are starting to learn to find value in the sharing of our ‘Visions’ as images on Instagram. To date, we have gathered together some 81 followers - we thank them all.

Even on Twitter, we are discovering things, as we post occasionally to our Twitter account. We also follow Centennial Parklands in Sydney as a source of inspiration for beautiful bodies of water, parklands and the children’s Wild Play Garden.

There are so many interesting points of view on Twitter, especially from people with influence such as the media, politicians and leaders of various groups. A few days ago, we discovered a tweet from the Secretary of the ACTU, Sally McManus, to celebrate the end of Victoria’s latest Covid lockdown, that tells us about the #BirdofTheYear, the superb fairy-wren, and also about walking in the John Cummins wetland. After some searching, we discovered this wetland is in a lovely area near Yea, Victoria.

This inspires us to keep planning to realise our Visions for Armidale’s creeklands!

As we attract more interest and support from across the community, and as we find out what ‘Visions’ are most favoured, we are getting closer to getting a community consensus. This is informing our plans for restoring natural flows of water so we can welcome more wildlife back to our unique tableland creeklands environment, for the enjoyment of all.