EU’s Public Diplomacy Through Social Media: Semantic Network Analysis of EU Institutions’ Facebook Pages

This paper aims to explore how the EU executes public diplomacy strategies coherently and effectively in the third country. Since the Lisbon Treaty, activated in December 2009, the European Union has moved forward to complete political integration. In 2011, the European External Action Service (EEAS) was newly established to make EU foreign policy more coherent and effective, and to increase Europe’s global influences. EEAS published the report named “Shared Vision, Common Action: A Stronger Europe” to suggest the Union’s diplomatic strategies. It suggests that propagating the Union’s foreign policy by social media as a priority task. In this regard, EEAS actively has employed diverse ranges of social media (such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Flicker) to put into practice the EU’s diplomatic strategies. Arguably, this guideline is disseminated to all EU delegations in the world. This study first conducts automated-semantic network analysis of Facebook messages in the EEAS official page. To conduct automated-semantic network analysis, this study employs NodeXL as an analytic software. Subsequently, this study does the same analytic process of Facebook messages in EU Delegation to South Korea official pages. Specifically, the objective of this study is, (1) to identify the coherence of public diplomacy efforts between EEAS and EU Delegation to Korea; and (2) to investigate the effectiveness of EU Delegation to Korea’s promotion strategies upon the Korean general public. The results of this study are expected to contribute to building more effective EU diplomacy strategies.