From January to June last year, the MoD spent £583,968 on social media. This year, they spent £853,832 according to official figures.

The Parliamentary question highlighting this information was asked by Deidre Brock, MP for Edinburgh North and Leith:

“To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, how much his Department has spent on advertising on social media in each month since January 2016.”

The question was answered by Tobias Ellwood, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence People and Veterans:

“The vast majority of social media advertising spend within the Ministry of Defence is to aid recruitment into our Armed Forces. Since January 2016 the Ministry of Defence spent the following amounts on social media.”

Since January 2016 the Ministry of Defence spent the following amounts on social media.

DateSpend
January 2016£71,553
February 2016£177,507
March 2016£165,471
April 2016£52,329
May 2016£64,864
June 2016£52,244
July 2016£86,978
August 2016£166,245
September 2016£144,463
October 2016£118,660
November 2016£179,258
December 2016£185,023
January 2017£212,572
February 2017£202,038
March 2017£244,785
April 2017£12,287
May 2017£79,831
June 2017£102,319

The increase in budget would appear to support claims that this is to aid recruitment and this is a common practice in western nations with a high percentage of young people using social media.

Recruiting via social media is booming, 84% of organisations do it, and 9% more are planning to. This is up sharply from 2011, when only 56% used social media for recruitment, according to a Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) survey.

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George has a degree in Cyber Security from Glasgow Caledonian University and has a keen interest in naval and cyber security matters and has appeared on national radio and television to discuss current events. George is on Twitter at @geoallison
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Mr Bell
Mr Bell
6 years ago

Going to be contentious here. £500k is a small sum compared to £13000000000 (£13billion) spent on foreign aid last year!