“#Government” - Understanding Dissemination, Transparency, Participation, Collaboration and Engagement on Twitter for Citizens

Overview & Synopsis

This study tries to explore how social media had been used for public administration activities across the global by analysing the tweets tagged with “#government” and “#gov”. On the basis of the literature social media usage by public administration had been classified into five dimensions, namely information dissemination and broadcasting; open transparency; open participation; open collaboration; and ubiquitous engagement. The study collects 296,417 tweets (after cleaning, 174,204 tweets) tagged as “#government” and “#gov” as open government data (as data is available to everyone but managed by private organizations) and this study applies open government data activities and social media analytics to derive the insights. The article also explores how different usage of the social media is effecting sharing and liking of the tweets. The implications of these findings can be important to government of different countries. The article concludes by pointing that social media can be used by citizens for open participation which can subsequently facilitate information dissemination and ubiquitous engagement.