Exploring citizens attitudes towards social media use by public administrations: the case of Spanish local governments

Public administrations have been using social media for more than a decade. During that time, social media has served public organizations as a mean to provide institutional information, reply to citizen demands, and even to manage emergency situations, among many other activities. However, we know little about whether these uses are really what the citizens expect. In this article, we explore citizen attitudes towards social media use by public administrations. To gather their declared preferences, we have conducted an original survey focusing on citizen attitudes towards the use of social media by Spanish city councils. Our results show a certain divide between what local governments offer in social media and what citizens demand. Citizens prefer to interact more with their local governments through certain instant-messaging technologies such as WhatsApp. They believe the information that city councils post should be more understandable, and that city councils should use these platforms for the economic promotion of the municipality, and citizen care. These results must be understood in a context of satisfaction with the services delivered, but also in a climate of mistrust towards the social media platforms and the information found on them.