A Longitudinal Analysis of Swedish Local Governments on Facebook: A visualisation of communication

Abstract

Facebook has become an essential channel for local governments to convey information and interact with citizens, and communication on the platform has been studied intensively through a range of smaller case studies in various countries. By looking at the development of Swedish municipalities’ Facebook usage between 2009 and 2017, this article attempts to frame such use in a longitudinal perspective. Based on more than 85,000 posts from 38 Swedish local governments, the findings show that most municipalities have adapted to an online visual culture, using photos and videos “to go viral”. The findings also show large increases in interactions, such as sharing and liking, whilst commenting appears to lag behind. It also shows that local government Facebook pages retain a strong, yet decreasing, tie with government web pages, visible through a tendency of the Facebook page to recycle information from the web page.

Unearthing citizens' acceptance factors for e‐participation initiatives through Facebook

“…Hence, local governments are also encouraged to incorporate their posts on Facebook with videos and images as this is expected to receive higher citizen attention and engagement compared with posts with links or text only. A recent study analyzed 85,000 posts content from 38 Swedish municipalities found that using integrating images and videos creates more citizen interaction and engagement (Baltz, 2020). This finding aligned with the finding of a study on Dubai's government in the United Arab Emirates use of Twitter to contact citizens that tweets containing videos and images generate greater citizen attention and engagement in terms of comments or retweets (Siyam et al, 2020).…”

“…Several studies indicate that governments predominantly are using SNS, mainly Facebook, to promote their works and to push one‐way information to citizens (Baltz, 2020; Lappas et al, 2018). This indicates a dearth of enacting any meaningful government‐citizen engagement to enhance citizens' participation initiatives through SNS by most governments.…”