The spread of information given through a social media, which occurs when the online community, that receives that information, decides to share the message with other users.
Published in Chapter:
A Comparative View of Citizen Engagement in Social Media of Local Governments from North American Countries
María del Mar Gálvez-Rodríhuez (University of Almería, Spain), Arturo Haro-de-Rosario (University of Almería, Spain), and María del Carmen Caba-Pérez (University of Almería, Spain)
Copyright: © 2017
|Pages: 18
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-1081-9.ch009
Abstract
Taking into consideration the growing popularity of social media in North American countries, this chapter aims to perform a comparative analysis of the use of Facebook as a communication strategy for encouraging citizen engagement among local governments in The United States, Canada and Mexico. With regards to the three dimensions used in all regions to measure online citizen engagement, in general terms, the “popularity” and “virality” dimensions are the most common, while the “commitment” dimension is still underutilized. With respect to the significant differences found, Mexican citizens are those that make the best use of the tool “like” to express their support of the information supplied by local governments. Furthermore, in relation to the citizens that are fans of the Facebook pages of local governments, we can observe that Canadian citizens show a greater interest in participating more actively in dialogue building while U.S. citizens are the most willing to disseminate information from their local governments.