Communicating the SDGs to create citizen awareness: an analysis of the activity of the Public Administration on Twitter

Abstract

This research analyses the communication of the Public Administration on Twitter related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), through the methodology of Social Network Analysis (ARS) and statistics, analysing the interaction index, the polarity and the objectivity of the messages, discovering that all users are connected to each other in some way and the user communities are established around the geographical scope where, in addition to the national accounts, the autonomous communities of Cataluña, Castilla-La Mancha, Extremadura and Aragón stand out. The tweets that deal with the SDGs are low in volume compared to the total number of publications, and they are more objective than those that deal with other topics, although there are no differences in engagement or polarity. Politicians from their individual accounts generate greater engagement and publish more positive messages than national or regional accounts, in addition, the tweets from this last category of accounts are more objective. Tweets that have supplementary media or links added achieve a higher engagement rate. For all these reasons, the research allows the Public Administration to efficiently define its communication on Twitter related to the 2030 Agenda through tweets published from the individual accounts of the heads of the institutions, including multimedia elements or links to complementary content and with a positive sentiment and relatively subjective content.