A Measurement Framework for Assessing the Contribution of Social Media to Public Engagement: An empirical analysis on Facebook

The public sector is increasingly turning to social media as a means to communicate and interact with citizens, but little is known about the contribution that these social technologies make to public engagement. This paper used a scoping literature review of studies examining social media in order to develop a framework that measures two Facebook features (popularity and commitment), which was then used to evaluate two different levels of public engagement (public communication and public participation). The framework was validated by applying it to the Facebook pages of several Italian city administrations, and a social media engagement matrix was proposed to interpret the findings.