Polish towns find tailored social media beats one-size-fits-all for government accountability
A study of 25,000 municipal social media posts reveals that governments boost public engagement and transparency by customizing their communication strategy to match discussion topics—not by applying uniform approaches. For policymakers and administrators, the finding suggests that different issues demand different digital engagement tactics to maintain public trust.
Originaltitel: Adaptive social media communication for web-based accountability
A growing body of research has explored the emergence of new digital forms of public accountability. Studies in this area show how digital technologies are equipped to support more participative information-sharing and provide dialogic tools for interactions with forums. However, no research has yet examined how to engage forums and enable web-based accountability relationships. We address this gap by highlighting the need to adapt social media communication strategies for topic-specific discussions. Our analysis builds on a database containing 25,485 posts extracted from social media platforms used by 13 Polish municipalities and focuses on two different matters of discussion: posts related to public health during the COVID-19 pandemic and non-COVID-19 related posts. Moreover, during the analysis, we consider two social media communication strategies: passive and participatory. Our findings indicate that both communication strategies can generate forum engagement, which subsequently supports web-based accountability. They also demonstrate that, to support forum engagement, municipalities should avoid one-style-fits-all approaches to communication and instead tailor strategies to the specific subject of discussion. This study contributes to expanding academic debates on web-based accountability by illustrating how the use of social media communication strategies can help engage citizens in public forums to enhance accountability relationships.