Purpose

The purpose of this study is to examine the information distributed on social media by government ministries. In addition, this study seeks to categorize and identify the characteristics of the highest engaging government social media posts.

Design/methodology/approach

This article is based on content analysis to examine the work of Israeli government ministries on Facebook. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze 6,292 posts posted over a six-month period, and a sample of 230 of the most popular posts was analyzed qualitatively.

Findings

Findings indicate that government ministries primarily direct and link to internal Facebook pages, with few, if any, referrals to official government websites. In addition, the types of content that generate the highest levels of engagement are classified as operations and events or symbolic acts (e.g. greetings or condolences) and are containing visual content as photos or video clips.

Originality/value

This study contributes to the literature on the topic in several ways. First, it presents findings from a cross-national study of government authorities and organizations that operate and serve diverse populations in a multicultural country. Second, this study presents a novel examination of information strategies by government organizations with focusing on the characteristics of links, media types, content and posting frequency.

中文翻译：

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用于政府信息传播的社交媒体：内容、特征和公民参与

目的

本研究的目的是检查政府部门在社交媒体上发布的信息。此外，本研究旨在对参与度最高的政府社交媒体帖子的特征进行分类和识别。

设计/方法/方法

本文基于内容分析来考察以色列政府部门在 Facebook 上的工作。描述性和推理性统计数据用于分析六个月内发布的 6,292 个帖子，并对 230 个最受欢迎的帖子样本进行了定性分析。

发现

调查结果表明，政府部门主要直接和链接到内部 Facebook 页面，很少（如果有的话）转介到官方政府网站。此外，产生最高参与度的内容类型被归类为操作和事件或象征性行为（例如问候或哀悼），并包含照片或视频剪辑等视觉内容。

原创性/价值

本研究以多种方式为有关该主题的文献做出了贡献。首先，它介绍了一项跨国研究的结果，该研究对在多元文化国家运营和服务于不同人群的政府当局和组织进行。其次，本研究对政府组织的信息策略进行了新的研究，重点关注链接、媒体类型、内容和发布频率的特征。