Exploring Facets of Africa’s Public Sector’s Dance with Social Media

Abstract

The chapter discusses social media within the context of Africa’s public sector. This chapter suggests that social media usage by governments and public sector organizations on the African continent displays remarkably different characteristics than how such communication and media channels are deployed within commercial settings. The chapter illustrates how social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, and LinkedIn are deployed by public sector organisations across Africa to achieve strategic communication objectives. The chapter argues that social media channels are pivotal in enhancing public sector communication due to their characteristics such as interactivity, participation, and user-generated value. Social media strategies adopted by government agencies on the African continent may involve a push strategy, which focusses on providing information to the public; a pull strategy, which seeks to engage and interact with target audience, and a networking strategy that focusses on information sharing. This chapter suggests that the use of social media vehicles among public sector organisations on the continent of Africa may go through diverse stages. These include an initial stage of using social media to provide information to target audiences, very much akin to propagandist, press agentry, and public information models. This is followed by an intermediary stage that involves employing using social media channels to engage and interact with the target publics in a manner that ensures receiving some feedback. Then, there is an advanced stage where public sector organizations employ social media use for two-way communication, collaboration and co-creation, but also for boosting service delivery. This chapter contributes to the relatively nascent literature streams on the nature of social media in the public sector in Africa.