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Engaging citizens through social media: how state governors in Nigeria are doing

Published: 27 October 2014 Publication History

Abstract

There is a growing move by government leaders in Nigeria to showcase their social media presence in personal communications or official government websites. However, the motive for using social media is not clear. Is it to take advantage of the power of social media to foster citizen engagement or is it just a case of joining the bandwagon? Are those with high social media activity, the Governor's perceived as high performers? Nigeria operates a federal system of government with 36 states. each managed by an elected "State Governor". This study attempts to answer the question posed with respect to the State Governors in Nigeria and their use of social media, specifically Facebook and Twitter. The social media activity of each Governor was scanned for evidence of engagement between them and citizens. The conclusion is reached that while many Governors have social media accounts, citizen engagement is quite low although there seems to be a relationship between a Governor's social media activity and governance performance.

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Cited By

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  • (2020)Factors Influencing the Uses of Social Media within the Government: A Systematic Literature Review2020 International Conference on Information Management and Technology (ICIMTech)10.1109/ICIMTech50083.2020.9211214(835-840)Online publication date: Aug-2020
  • (2017)Use of Social Media in Citizen-Centric Electronic Government ServicesInternational Journal of Electronic Government Research10.4018/IJEGR.201707010413:3(55-79)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2017
  • (2017)Exploring the Role of Social Media in e-GovernmentProceedings of the 10th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance10.1145/3047273.3047374(97-106)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2017

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ICEGOV '14: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance
    October 2014
    563 pages
    ISBN:9781605586113
    DOI:10.1145/2691195
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    • Macao Foundation, Macao SAR Govt: Macao Foundation, Macao SAR Government
    • Municipio de Guimarães: Municipio de Guimarães

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 27 October 2014

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    Author Tags

    1. citizen
    2. citizen engagement
    3. e-governance
    4. government
    5. social media

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    ICEGOV2014
    Sponsor:
    • Macao Foundation, Macao SAR Govt
    • Municipio de Guimarães

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    ICEGOV '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 30 of 73 submissions, 41%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 350 of 865 submissions, 40%

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    • (2020)Factors Influencing the Uses of Social Media within the Government: A Systematic Literature Review2020 International Conference on Information Management and Technology (ICIMTech)10.1109/ICIMTech50083.2020.9211214(835-840)Online publication date: Aug-2020
    • (2017)Use of Social Media in Citizen-Centric Electronic Government ServicesInternational Journal of Electronic Government Research10.4018/IJEGR.201707010413:3(55-79)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2017
    • (2017)Exploring the Role of Social Media in e-GovernmentProceedings of the 10th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance10.1145/3047273.3047374(97-106)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2017

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