It’s not a particularly groundbreaking or innovative use of the micro-blogging platform, and similar things have been done before, but the content the Manchester police submitted to Twitter is extremely interesting.

The reason the force carried out this 24 hour tweet-fest is to highlight the amount of time police officers have to spend on ‘social work’, and to raise public awareness of just what the police have to spend most of their time on.

Throughout the day, the force tweeted about their calls, ranging from investigating reports of suspicious activity or responding to legitimate emergency calls, and there were an alarming amount of seemingly pointless wastes of police time.

Of course, plenty of them were also legitimate and important matters that required immediate police attention...

At 5am this morning the experiment came to a close, and the force stopped tweeting their incident reports. Over 3200 tweets had been submitted in total during the 24 hour event, and it’s now up to the police to sift through those reports and learn from them.

The experiment was a huge success and has provided the Greater Manchester Police a significant amount of data, which can hopefully provide insights into ways that their efficiency can be improved while increasing public awareness of just what it is that police have to do day-to-day.

Chief Constable Peter Fahy said: “"A lot of what we do is dealing with social problems such as missing children, people with mental health problems and domestic abuse.

"Often these incidents can be incredibly complex and need a lot of time, resource and expertise.

"I am not saying that we shouldn't deal with these types of incidents, far from it, but what I am saying is that this work is not recognised in league tables and measurements - yet is a huge part of what we do."

It’s certainly been a spectacle, and a lot of retweets of humorous calls were made throughout the day. But it’s important to realise that it’s also a very serious issue, despite its obvious entertainment value.

We hope that the event has achieved what the Greater Manchester Police had intended!