Determinants of public engagement on municipal Facebook pages

Abstract

This article analyzes the determinants of public engagement on the Facebook pages of municipalities. The sample consists of 170 Italian and Spanish municipalities that used Facebook in 2014. The findings show that posting a lot of information on municipal Facebook pages does not increase the engagement of citizens. Also, frequent posting of information per se does not engage public engagement. However, if the posts are published when public can pay attention to them (e.g., off days), the likelihood of public engagement increases. Furthermore, the citizens’ engagement on municipal Facebook page depends on the level of citizens’ income – there is a negative relationship between citizens’ income and the level of participation.

Keywords:

• e-government
• e-participation
• Facebook
• municipality
• public engagement
• social media

Notes

1 According to the 2018 Global Digital suite of reports from We Are Social and Hootsuite (2018), Facebook’s core platform dominates the social media landscape globally, with total users up 15% year-on-year reaching almost 2.17 billion at the start of 2018.