The Greek presidency of the Council of the EU is already into its second month. The Presidency was officially inaugurated on January 8 with a joint meeting between the College of Commissioners and members of the Greek cabinet at Zappeion Megaron, followed by the opening ceremony at Megaron Athens Concert Hall, where the keynote speech was delivered by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras. Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Evangelos Venizelos, the President of the European Council, Herman van Rompuy, and the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso also addressed the event.

In the first month, one Informal Ministerial Council (JHA) and 7 Expert meetings on various subjects were held in Athens, at Zappeion Megaron, with over 1000 delegates participating and 311 media representatives accredited for the JHA meeting. In the same period, 18 Coreper and Political and Security Committee (PSC) meetings took place in Brussels.

Greek art everywhere…
An art exhibition will be running at Zappeion Megaron for the duration of the Presidency, with works from the National Gallery (13), the National Museum of Contemporary Art (6), the Velimezi Collection (8 post-Byzantine icons), the Zoggolopoulos Foundation (3 sculptures) Felios Collection (5), as well as 250 photographs from the Benaki Museum. In addition, an exhibition of Greek ancient and contemporary art is being hosted at the Bozar Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels, running through April 2014. Meanwhile, the European Parliament is showing off its Greek art collection of 27 paintings and sculptures, in honour of the Greek Presidency.

GR2014.eu: Off to a successful start
The official website of the Presidency, online-casino-greece.com, was launched in its final version on 23 December 2013 (a provisional website had been online from 17 November).

During this time, 57,500 people have visited the website, generating 90,552 visits, and 333,344 pageviews. The highest point - 10,937 visitors - was on opening day. On average, users visited 3.68 pages per visit, and stayed in the site, an average time of 3mins 44secs. Fifty-nine percent of visitors were new to the website.
Forty percent of visitors came from links on other sites, 30% from searching and 23% came directly to the site, while 7% came from social media. The webpages of EU institutions top the list of the main referral pages. Fifty-five percent of visitors come from Greece and Belgium, followed by visitors from Germany, France, Britain and Italy.

Up to the end of January, the website had published 122 news items (press releases, features, speeches) in English and Greek – 34 in the provisional site and 78 in the final version, at an average of 2.6 per day. Moreover, 66 and 61 news items were translated into French and German, respectively.

Twenty-eight videos were published on our YouTube channel in this period, while three issues of the Presidency Newsletter came out reaching some 2,500 subscribers.

@online-casino-greece.com: A Presidency strong in social media
Building on previous presidencies’ experience, and the role of social media in reaching out to the younger generation, the Greek Presidency focused a lot of its attention on Twitter. As a result, the account, launched on 15 November 2013, had by the end of January acquired 8,971 followers. Five thousand one hundred of these had begun following the account by December 31, while the stream of followers has continued to grow steadily since the beginning of the Greek semester (860.25 followers gained weekly). The top days as far as new followers go were January 1, the first day of the Greek semester (460 new followers), and January 8, the day of the official inauguration of the Greek presidency (432 new followers).

Since its launch, and up to January 30, the Presidency account has posted 566 tweets - that is an average of 7.34 tweets per day.

These tweets contained a total of 662 Twitter account mentions (1.17/tweet) and 1,518 hashtags (2.69/tweet). The account has a strong retweet record: 503 out of the 566 tweets (or 89.03%) have been retweeted by other users - an average of 9.35 times per tweet, and a total of 4,703 retweets. Furthermore, 404 of our tweets (or 73.27%) have been favourited by other users, with a total of 1,395 favourites (3.37/tweet).

With regard to the influence of the Presidency twitter account, @gr2014eu has reached a score of 68 in Klout influence - a platform measuring on a scale of 1-100 how influential a Twitter account is.

The Greek Presidency is also active on social media platforms such as Storify and Vine. Visit the Greek Presidency accounts on Storify and Vine at these links.