Utilizing Facebook by the Arab World Governments: The Communication Success Factor

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.