Pushing Open Government Through Social Media

E-government aims to enhance the interaction between citizens, business, and government. Recently, the term open government is increasingly used to emphasize the importance of co-creation in governmental issues. In this study, the social media activities of the municipalities of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, are investigated with regard to the topic “open government” as one pillar of e-government. The findings show that user interaction is mostly represented through likes and shares and rarely by comments. A topic detection of the posted content reveals that different terms are covered by the municipalities and shows that open government is getting more and more diverse in recent years. The number of posts is still increasing each year on the social media platforms Facebook and Twitter, but the topic of open government is still a peripheral phenomenon