Abstract

Social media have proven to be convenient tools that can be used by government entities to increase openness and publicity, gain a greater understanding of public opinions, promote participation, transparency and engagement, as well as to reach many users at low cost. - The purpose of this paper is to explore the effectiveness of using social media by the government entities in UAE. It is a network analysis study seeking mainly quantitative data. 100 UAE government accounts, belong to (25) entities, were examined using web-based analytical tools. - The general findings of the study indicate that the UAE government communication entities accounts convey a rich picture of how these entities interact with their stakeholders on their social media. Most of them are performing an active role in terms of publicity, reach, marketing and transparency. However, the level of maturity of using social media in general has not matured yet and they are not effective to somewhat in communicating with the stakeholders in terms of participation and engagement. Also, it is indicated that there is a significant difference between the effectiveness of these entities in terms of reach, transparency and participation. In general, they do not utilize the full types, capacity and features of social media in their government communication. They are mainly depending on Tweeter and Facebook

Document Type

Article

Publisher

Zayed University

Publication Date

2017

Author First name, Last name, Institution

Elsayed Darwish

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