Police engagement with rural communities on Facebook

Abstract

Police organizations in Western liberal democracies are under increasing pressure to generate effective means of engaging with the communities that they serve. Established as a contemporary means of communication engagement, many police organizations have turned to social media to interact with citizens. A growing body of work examines the nature of public engagement with police social media. However, it tends not to differentiate by the features of place. This article starts to fill this gap by examining the effectiveness of the police use of Facebook as an engagement tool with rural communities, reporting on research conducted in the United Kingdom and in Australia. The aim here is to identify what type of content rural police Facebook pages are posting and whether certain post types and post-characteristics are associated with higher levels of engagement. We argue that certain characteristics of Facebook posts assist in gaining ‘cut through’ and thus effective engagement with rural communities. Implications for community engagement are discussed.