Social media adoption in local governments. The case of Poland
Social media adoption in local governments. The case of Poland

Summary/Abstract: The use of social media is gradually transforming all marketing activities also in the public sector. Social media in public administration constitutes also a research area for numerous scholars not only with economic background. Still a majority of contributions deal with qualitative aspects of social media adoption by either presenting good practices or comparing the selected social media of cities and countries. Hence there is a paucity of research that presents the real share of social media adoption in public administration, especially at the local level. The aim of this paper is to fill this research gap and present the data of social media adoption among lowest level of Polish local government. As a research area we choose communes (municipalities (Polish: gmina) NUTS 5) as the lowest administrative unit in Poland. We used a random sample of 385 Polish communes (out of 2,478) and examined whether they have official social media profiles by inspecting their official web sites. The main result of this study is the estimation of a percentage of communes that have at least one social media official profile which in 2016 was 52,71%. This represents a huge expansion of social media popularity as in 2015 we estimated the same number as 26,75%. The structure of used social media sites between 2015 and 2016 did not change much as Facebook remained the most often chosen social media for local public administration.

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