Strategic communication? Measurement and evaluation of Twitter use among municipal governments

Government entities utilize social media to communicate with primary, secondary, and tertiary constituents. The microblog Twitter serves as a rapid and inexpensive means of communication, allowing municipal governments to reach a large and diverse audience with limited time or resource costs. Lacking in the existing research are examinations of whether governments are using social media outlets like Twitter as strategic communication tools or merely as ad-hoc communication outlets. By applying the Barcelona Principles 3.0 as the theoretical framework, this study explores whether U.S. municipalities measure and evaluate their Twitter activity as part of a formal communications process informed by modern public relations standards, an whether differences in municipal resources and demographics predict the integration of social media measurement and evaluation. The results suggest that while formal communication plans are reported to exist, there is not a sufficient presence of goals, policies, procedures, and metrics to consider Twitter a formal, strategic communication tool for participating municipalities. Total population and the administrative role of the social media account manager were also found to impact the perception of defined procedures and specific assessment metrics. Though these results suggest a lack of formal integration of social media measurement and evaluation, more research is needed to explore the factors which may impact this situation.