Governmental information strategies and public reactions with government social media content

Background: Social media platforms are growingly used by citizens to search for news and political information (Mitchell et al., 2016), thus, providing important incentives for public organizations to increase their communication efforts on these platforms. Government bodies have increasingly relied on social media for encouraging participatory democracy, transmitting information about public policies and services, and improving their presentation (DePaula et al., 2018). Additionally, these platforms have been used for crisis communication, a practice that has reached unprecedented levels with the coronavirus pandemic (van Dijck & Alinejad, 2020). Research questions: Our study investigates RQ1) what kind of content is posted by government departments on social media and how the nature of the content has changed since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic? RQ2) how do other social media users react to these messages? Data: We rely on the entire history of tweets emitted by the Swiss government departments. Then, the tweets from the most active departments are manually annotated to cover changes in the content of communication. To this aim, we extend and adapt the coding framework proposed by DePaula et al. (2018). To annotate a manageable, yet representative, number of tweets, we reduce the sample size by focusing on tweets emitted one year before the Covid-19 outbreak until December 2021. Methods of analysis: We assess government departments’ activity by comparing their tweeting frequency to other important government bodies (e.g. Government Ministers, Government Speaker, and Parliament). We also contextualise the observed trends with information about public reliance on social media as an information source measured with opinion survey data. To answer RQ1, we use statistical tests to highlight important changes in the communication strategies of each department before and after the Covid-19 outbreak. To answer RQ2, we investigate how the departments’ messages trigger other users’ engagement on social media relying on multivariate analysis. We especially analyse differences in users’ reactions in the form of likes, comments, and shares to distinct types of content. Findings: We find a number of statistically significant results. There has been a shift in content before and after the Covid-19 outbreak towards more participative and symbolic communication. However, there are variations in how departments adapted their communication strategies. Moreover, we observe different effects of the communication strategy on measures of user interaction. For instance, our results highlight that promoting symbolic messages, showing responsiveness to citizens’ concerns, and engaging in dialogue with citizens are effective strategies for government departments to trigger other users’ interaction. Implications of the results: These findings highlight future paths of improvement to increase the public sector communication effectiveness. Most notably, our study discusses how social media platforms can be used to generate deliberative conversations between government and citizens.