Abstract
This paper introduces a method for assessing the influence of Twitter accounts of central e-government agencies. It first stresses the importance of activity and popularity of the e-government accounts, and also the importance of community formation among followers-citizens, as the two main stages of e-government adoption. The proposed approach combines activity and popularity of the accounts and followers’ community characteristics in a ranking system, using an idea originally introduced to measure blogosphere authority. A Twitter Authority Index is produced. The method is demonstrated through an extended example: 56 Twitter accounts of ministries of EU countries are sorted according to their indexes in the proposed ranking system. Detailed values for the ministries’ accounts and average values for the countries that the ministries belong to are reported and commented.
Highlights
The microblogging platform Twitter is rapidly expanding since its official launch in 2006
This paper proposes a methodology for assessing the performance of e-government Twitter accounts
Similar ministries of EU countries were searched and recorded. This exclusion of some EU countries ministries from the study may sound as a limitation, the objective is to produce a Twitter Authority Index which could be applied in any e-government context and the specific data only serve as an example to demonstrate the proposed method
Summary
The microblogging platform Twitter is rapidly expanding since its official launch in 2006. The dialogic nature of Twitter [7] that enables real-time, two-way communication among users allows governments to create online communities that defy organizational boundaries and traditional communication, reach and transform citizens from passive recipients of digital information and services to active participants who monitor administrative activities and administrative requests, and take part in the formation of consensus on specific issues [6,8,9]. Governments, in order to use Twitter effectively and give citizens another way to participate in government, have to realize that they can leverage the power of the crowd to collect real-time feedback and to create and spread messages and shift from using Twitter as one-way information platform to a two-way communication channel [12]
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