F212 and F3 community building: facebook pages

The F212 and F3 Facebook communities

During the construction of an important part of the F212 cycle highway, the province of Flemish-Brabant decided to set up a Facebook community around the cycle highway works and future plans. The province wanted to replicate the successful bottom-up initiative of a successful community around the F3 cycle highway between Leuven and Brussels. Together with local ambassadors in Asse (cyclist federation) a new F212 community was launched during the opening of the new infrastructure. More and more members are now joining and sharing pictures and cycle highway stories. Through word of mouth and the social media, new members are joining the community. Some of the members get or give route planning advise.      

Digital strategy in Flanders

In 2015 the province of Flemish-Brabant decided to work out a new network-identity for the (future) cycle highways in its region. Flemish-Brabant realized that this exercise could be improved by collaborating together with the other four Flemish provinces and Brussels. The provinces of Antwerp, Limburg, East and West Flanders, as supra local governments, strongly endorsed the strength of the higher scale of branding.
The collaboration not only resulted in a shared network-identity with a blue code-logo (F-numbers), but also in a shared official website fietssnelwegen.be and a Facebook page to disclose the cycle highway network and improve the communication towards (potential) users. In the future, the official website will also include the cycle highway ("cyclostrade") network of Brussels. Brussels will use the same logo and brand colour, combined with C-codes instead of F-codes.