Information strategies and affective reactions: How citizens interact with government social media content

As social media use grows among the general population, becoming a major source of information, government organizations around the world have widely adopted these platforms. While researchers on government social media have acknowledged the potential functions of these technologies for participatory democracy, transparency, and collaboration, we have come to learn that prominent social media sites are also sites for marketing and favorable presentations. Given the diversity of content that may flow through a government social media channel, what kind of content is actually adopted? Moreover, how do users react to these diverse content types? In this empirical study, we collected Facebook posts of local government departments across the United States and categorized each post content using a framework of government social media communication strategies. We then analysed differences in users' reactions in the form of likes, comments, and shares to distinct types of content. We found a number of statistically significant results, providing some evidence for the effects of communication strategy or content type on measures of user interaction. Our results highlight the affective and symbolic nature of social media but also point to higher levels of interaction to instances where governments themselves engage in dialogue with citizens. We believe these results are important for scholars and proponents of government communication as they complicate the notion that social network sites can be a generative source of rational critical thought and deliberative conversations.