Utilizing Facebook by the Arab World Governments

Abstract

This study explored the importance of social media as a communication channel, and the reasons that lead governments to adopt such channel in their communication. Twelve Arab governments out of all twenty-two Arab countries adopted such strategy and were included in the authors' sample. Governments who adopted such a channel successfully communicated with citizens utilizing commonly used post properties (i.e. Likes, Comments and Shares). This study found that Arab governments posted news and information on Facebook with an average of 102.58 posts per year, which indicates that posting over Facebook is very poor. Also, it is found that using multimedia with different types lead to more communication from the stakeholders compared with posts that didn't use it. Such richness in media improved the communication intensity and lead to communication success. The second major contribution of this study is to build the TPCC index for measuring communication success. Such composite index is an integrated measure from four major indices; transparency, participation, collaboration, and comfort. Detailed results, conclusions, limitations, and future work are explained further.

The influence of utilising Facebook on e-government adoption

“…Social media has enabled multiple features including communication and participating opportunities and allowing direct instant interactions between parties (Dennen and Bruner, 2014). Social media offers many services and benefits like encouraging citizens to sharing their opinions and information, enhancing the relationship between G2C and increasing the collaboration and communication between both parties (Mishaal and Abu-Shanab, 2017). The major features that SNs offer is the ease of access and reach to any person on the internet, which made governments join such platforms to improve the relationship with citizens (Khasawneh and Abu-Shanab, 2013).…”

“…Only 12 countries out of the 22 Arab countries included in the study communicated with citizens utilising Facebook features. The authors utilised citizens records related to their likes, comments and shares (Mishaal and Abu-Shanab, 2017). The results of the study indicated that posting over Facebook was very poor and using multimedia encouraged more communication between involved parties.…”

Unearthing citizens' acceptance factors for e‐participation initiatives through Facebook

“…Other studies in the MENA country of Oman found that government agencies failed to take full advantage of SNS to design and deliver more collaborative, participatory, and interactive relationships with citizens (Al‐Aufi et al, 2017; Dalwai et al, 2020). A recent study found that most Arab governments used Facebook for self‐promotion and information dissemination rather than being genuinely open with their citizenry (Mishaal & Abu‐Shanab, 2017). A similar finding was reached by a previous study that found that most Arabic governments were doing very little to encourage online participation (Halpern et al, 2012).…”