Blog Listing | USAGov

Learn about the priorities, research, challenges, and great discoveries that shape the way USAGov connects people with government services and programs. Select year and/or month to see the blog entries from the selected year/month.

A Year of COVID Search Trends From USAGov

It has been one year since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

📅 March 17, 2021

Image of a person holding a smartphone displaying the "usagov" Instagram page with 549 posts and 28.7K followers, featuring various government-related images, with a coffee cup and "Brought to you by usa.gov" text below.

Social media is a powerful tool that can help government agencies connect directly to the people they serve. Agencies have been using Facebook and Twitter for years. But many are still unlocking the power of Instagram to share resources in an engaging, simple manner.

At USAGov, we have been experimenting with our Instagram page and how to grow our following. Through strategic planning and creativity, we’re learning to reach more people and better understand what kind of information they need.

📅 March 9, 2021

Image of a magnifying glass resting on a laptop keyboard, with the glass magnifying a portion of the keys.

Scammers are everywhere. And they’re always looking for new ways to separate people from their money.

While digging through website analytics data, we uncovered scam websites pretending to be USA.gov.

📅 November 5, 2020

Image of a young woman with long black hair, wearing a blue top, standing outdoors with greenery and a building with a blue awning in the background.

USAGov tries to incorporate unique perspectives into our program from different team members. One way we do this is by working with college students and recent grads on specific projects or through long-term programs. They join the USAGov family and contribute to UX research, social media management, and many other projects.

When hosting students at your agency, these tips from our own USAGov intern, Jessie Chen can help both students and agencies be successful contributors and managers.

📅 October 26, 2020

Image of an X post from @USAGov dated 12 Mar 2020, offering help with bills and expenses through government programs, with a link https://go.usa.gov/xdXKa. The post includes a photo of a stressed man at a laptop, surrounded by people with papers and a phone.

How do people use Facebook and Twitter differently? Do they know which accounts and links in social media posts they can trust? What started as a USAGov study of people’s thoughts about short links in Facebook and Twitter posts taught us more than we were expecting.

The Participants

We did live, remote interviews with 10 social media users: four female, six male. They were between the ages of 20 and 48 and represented a range of education and income levels.

📅 September 30, 2020