What is Network Analysis

The chapter aims to analyze how social media engages citizens in issues related to municipal management in Brazilian capital cities (27 cities). For that, Twitter data was collected, and descriptive analysis, text mining, and social network analysis were carried out. Results show the most frequent interactions regarded sharing posts, replies, and reactions were less frequent. Text mining suggested behavior on Twitter is related on the hot news, so discussions tend to be superficial; network analysis showed mayor accounts have more connections with users than the cities' official accounts, which suggests a necessity for personification on the conversation. Interactions are both centralized (started by the city) and decentralized (start by the citizen), but consist merely of information transmission and opinion sharing, and more complex kinds of participation, such as co-creation and decision-making were not observed. These findings show the potential of social media communication for public management and give insights on how to develop a successful policy to participate in social media.