ABSTRACT
Social media technologies are an important communication channel that many government organizations have added to their public affairs toolkit. Social technologies, including weblogs such as WordPress, microblogging services such as Twitter, instant messengers such as Yammer, photosharing sites such as Instagram, or social networking sites such as Facebook, are used for intra- as well as extra-organizational purposes. What these tools have in common is usually a networking component: Users can create their own profile page with individual information about themselves, follow each other’s updates, or create a newsfeed with their own updates. Boyd and Ellison define social media tools as
web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.
(2007:210) Many of the previously mentioned sites allow organizations, such as government agencies, to create pages that indicate their organizational status, geographic location, opening hours, and advanced analytic capabilities beyond those functionalities provided to individual users. An important characteristic of social networking sites and other social media tools is the publicness character of the updates: users can follow public updates, without visiting the organizations’ oftentimes relatively static (e-government) websites.