Social Media as a Government Communication Tool: The Case of Addis Ababa City Government Mayor’s Office
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Date
2019-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
These days the Social media has become dominant communication tool among individuals and organizations, both governmental and private. This study is conducted mainly with an objective of exploring how the Addis Ababa City Government Mayor’s Office has been using the social media to communicate with its publics. The study specifically addresses how concerned staffs of the Office see the potential of social media as a government communication tool; describes the extent the Office uses social media to reach out to its publics; examines the opportunities and challenges for using the social media as a government communication tool at the Office and investigates the factors that affected the office’s decision of choosing social media as a government communication tool. In order to achieve these objectives of the study, exploratory research design is employed. The research approach used in this study is qualitative while in-depth interview and qualitative content analysis data collection methods are used to gather relevant data for the study. The samples for the study are selected purposefully from the Office in general and from the specific department, the press secretariat, which has the responsibility of managing the social media activities of the Office. Accordingly in-depth interviews were conducted with twenty people and seventy-eight social media posts which are shared on the official Facebook page of the Office from March 1 to May 20, 2019 were investigated. Posts on the official Telegram channel of the Office during the same period of time were also explored The result of the study indicates that the use of social media as a government communication tool is well understood by the staffs of the Office. There is a directorate whose responsibility is managing the social media activities of the Office and there is also frequent use of the social media at the Office. The activities of the Office on the social media lacks strategies and mainly focused on information delivery while false information on the social media is among the challenges faced by the Office on its activities. The popularity of the social media amongst the society is, its simplistic nature to use and the less amount of time that it require to accomplish the task are the factors that made the Office to engage in the social media.
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