Indian Railways’ Social Media Presence To Get Professional Makeover: Guidelines Released To Hire Public Relations Team

Indian Railways is planning to hire Public Relations teams which will formulate strategies for social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc as it has issued a set of guidelines to hire private agencies to manage its publicity, reports NDTV.

The hired public relations managers will drive Indian Railways publicity campaign in the national capital as well as each of its 18 zones in the country.

Currently, around 70 officers including one chief public relations officer (PRO) in each zone, along with several senior PROs and public relation inspectors, provide information to the media and run Indian Railways’ social media handles. Now, a team of 17 private PR professionals will be hired for each zone to assist them.

"We already have private agencies working with us in the zones, who help us with our publicity work. This is not new. What we have done now is that we have tried to standardise the process," a senior Railway Board official said.

Costing around Rs 2 crore, one team of 17 trained professionals, including a team leader, a social media manager, content analysts, content writers, video editors and others, will be engaged in each zone.

The team will create a dashboard for its zone, where all news articles and television clips concerning the zone will be available online. In collaboration with the chief public relations officers (CPROs, they will handle social media activities, aggregate the grievances received by the national transporter through such forums, analyse media coverage, assist in gathering and dissemination of information to the media and also prepare reports to be submitted monthly and quarterly to senior officials.