E-Government and Social Media Sites: The Role and Impact

Abstract

The Internet became an indispensable part of people's lives because of the significant role it plays in the way individuals interact, communicate and collaborate with each other. Also, the recent evolvements in social media (such as blogs, websites and other social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter and Googleplus) tempted governments around the world to join these sites in a try to benefit from the new way of communication and interaction provided by such tools. On the other hand, social media has become a platform that is easily accessible to anyone with Internet access which makes governments that joined these sites have the capacity to rebuild the relationship with their citizens and increase the level of citizens' engagement and participation. In order to achieve the goal of this paper, the Jordan e-government page on Facebook is taken as a case study. Several page insights indicates that there is a good level of engagement by citizens, where they interact positively with the posts published by the page through making a like, comment, share, answering a question or just see the page. Also, it is noticeable that the insights show that the page fan base is mostly comprised of men between 25 and 34.