A Measurement Framework for Assessing the Contribution of Social Media to Public Engagement: An empirical analysis on Facebook

Abstract

The public sector is increasingly turning to social media as a means to communicate and interact with citizens, but little is known about the contribution that these social technologies make to public engagement. This paper used a scoping literature review of studies examining social media in order to develop a framework that measures two Facebook features (popularity and commitment), which was then used to evaluate two different levels of public engagement (public communication and public participation). The framework was validated by applying it to the Facebook pages of several Italian city administrations, and a social media engagement matrix was proposed to interpret the findings.

Key words:

• Public engagement
• social media
• public participation
• measurement

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 A Facebook fan is a user who clicked the button ‘Like’ of a certain page and because of this, he will receive updates from the page’s administrators. Liking a post means to click on the ‘Like’ button in correspondence of a certain post published by the page administrator. While a user can became a fan of a certain Facebook page just once, he can ‘Like’ one or more posts published by the administrator.