Changes in the forms of communication between local governments and local communities, as exemplified by the social networking site Facebook

Abstract

Thesis/aim: The aim of the research described in this article is to find out if and how local government units use social networking sites, in this case: the social networking site Facebook, in the process of communicating with local communities.
Research methods: A quantitative content analysis was used to realise the objective, the study covered strategic documents of the district starosties of the Lubuskie Voivodeship, the official websites of the above-mentioned starosties and their Facebook fanpage.
Results: the first part of the article presents an analysis of the strategic documents in terms of the occurrence of specific keywords in them, extracted from the literature on the subject (Internet, communication, social media, Facebook, informing); the second part of the article is an analysis of the presence of the county starosties on Facebook – the date the fanpage was created, the number of likes, the number of posts posted in the studied period and the number of reactions to them.
Conclusions: Local self-government units actively use Facebook in the process of communicating with local communities, however, this does not result from provisions in strategic documents and is not regulated by them.