Toward a typology of government social media communication: Democratic goals, symbolic acts and self-presentation

Highlights

• We develop a typology of government communication on social media.

• We conduct a content analysis of 2893 Facebook posts of distinct local government departments across the United States.

• We find that much of government social media communication belongs to a sphere of symbolic and presentational exchanges.

• We discuss the purpose for these types of communication and point to implications for governments and citizens.

Abstract

Social media have provided new environments for both individuals and organizations to communicate. The literature on government use of social media has noted that these platforms provide a variety of democratic functions for government institutions, in their ability to increase transparency and citizen participation. However, there is less recognition and understanding in this context about the symbolic and presentational content governments communicate on social media. This is the case despite the fact that social media are tools for self-presentation, the exchange of symbolic content, and marketing. We have conducted a literature review from diverse sources, including e-government, business, human-computer interaction, social psychology and human communication to develop a typology of government communication on social media. We present a classification scheme with 12 specific categories and discuss the potential purposes of these various types of communication. Via empirical content analysis, we code a total of 2893 Facebook posts of local governments across the U.S., in a pilot and in a confirmatory study. This analysis allows us to better understand the categories of communication and the extent of their presence. Although we find that most content on local government Facebook pages falls into the category of democratic information provision, almost half of all messages refer to symbolic and presentational types of information exchanges. We illustrate our results with examples, and present a discussion of these findings with implications for practitioners and future research.

Introduction

Since the inception of the Internet, social media has generated profound changes in how individuals and organizations communicate and exchange information. Research on the use of social media by governments first argued these tools would provide government opportunities for fulfilling basic democratic goals of transparency, citizen participation, and engagement (Chun and Luna-Reyes, 2012, Criado et al., 2013, Mergel, 2012). The distributed nature of these technologies, and their adoption by large segments of the population, meant that social media could be used for disseminating critical information about government operations (Bertot et al., 2010, Linders, 2012), for dialogue with citizens (Bonsón, Torres, Royo, & Flores, 2012) and to generally perform communication functions that advance the public good and increase public value (Lee and Kwak, 2012, Mergel, 2012, Picazo-Vela et al., 2016). To a large extent, positive uses of the most popular social media sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) have been observed, especially in the areas of crisis communication (Graham et al., 2015, Hagen et al., 2017); when conceiving of the media as additional outlets for governments to announce services (Gao and Lee, 2017, Lenhard, 2016); and as part of the integration into the contemporary online, networked media of public communication (Meijer and Torenvlied, 2016, Wukich and Mergel, 2016).

A common framework to explore the information and communication that governments exchange on social media has been the 3-category model of push, pull, and networking communication—which relate respectively to the open government goals of transparency, participation, and collaboration (Harrison et al., 2012, Meijer and Thaens, 2013, Mergel, 2013a, Mossberger et al., 2013, Nam, 2012). However, research has found that messages on social media are often for “self-promotion” and “marketing” (Bellström et al., 2016, Bonsón et al., 2015, Sobaci and Karkin, 2013), uses of the application that do not fit and are not theorized under this framework. Although critical and distinct perspectives on the use of these technologies by governments have emerged (Bryer, 2011, Zavattaro and Sementelli, 2014), the e-government literature does not frequently explore why or how these self-presentational types of activities relate to government communication functions.

In this paper, we argue that a great portion of government's use of social media is for symbolic and presentational purposes. We argue this is the case because social media are not only tools for democratic transparency and citizen participation, but also tools for self-presentation, the exchange of symbolic gestures, and the marketing of products and services. To understand the multi-faceted nature of government information on social media, we thus propose a descriptive model of types of communication that extends the 3-category model of push, pull and networking, to include 1 additional broad category of symbolic and presentational communication.

For this study, we have conducted a broad literature review from diverse sources, including e-government, business, human-computer interaction, and social psychology research that pertain to organizational communication and uses of social media and social networking sites (SNS)—terms we use interchangeably. From this literature, we develop a typology of government communication that may be used to analyze government social media content or information. We discuss the characteristics of each type of communication and explore the nature and purpose of the information being exchanged. We then address two empirical questions: RQ1: To what extent can the Facebook messages in a sample of local government departments be categorized within the typology? And RQ2: What differences can be observed about the extent to which the types of communication are used across local governments in the United States? To answer these questions, we use a stratified sampling technique to identify diverse local government department across the U.S. and carry out a content analysis of their Facebook posts to examine the actual adoption of the different types of communication. We illustrate our results with examples of messages and, finally, provide a discussion of the results with implications for practitioners and future research.