Local engagement online: Municipal Facebook pages as hubs of interaction

The article presents the results of a comprehensive study of the scope and character of the activities of the Israeli municipalities on Facebook.¹1This study was conducted with the assistance of the institute for the study of New Media, Politics and Society at Ariel University. The authors express their gratitude to Bar Ram, Hadas Schlussel, Valerie Aronov, Varonika Makogon, Avital Mandel and Yakira Azulay for their assistance in collecting and processing the data and preparing the manuscript. The study maps the Facebook presence of Israeli municipalities and checks for correlations between Facebook presence, municipality size, and the geographic and socio-demographic characteristics of the municipalities. We then measure several engagement indices of municipal activities on Facebook (number of fans, average likes, comments, and shares of posts) and check for correlations of these engagement indices with municipality size and geographic and social demographic characteristics of the municipalities. The article concludes with a review of several indices of municipality Facebook page activity, including scope of content uploaded by the page and by fans, content formats (statuses, images, and videos) and their reception.