Writings on the city wall: An analysis of popular municipal facebook pages posts

Municipality Facebook pages are significant social media arenas for maintaining contact between representatives and their constituencies. The authors use digital tools to collect and analyze some 24,000 posts from the Facebook pages of all Israeli municipalities in a six-month period. Following a purely automatic linguistic analysis of the texts of all posts published on the pages, this study moved to a manual coding of a sample of the most popular posts in the data in order to gain insight into the character of the discourse in these arenas; the actors; the format, type, and emotionality of the contents that attract the highest levels of engagement.