Empirical analysis of posts and interactions: a case of Australian Government Facebook pages

Research on government use of Facebook (FB) and citizen engagement has increased in the last five years or so; however there is a scarcity of empirical research that identify the extent of agency and audience engagement on government FB pages. Questions still remains unanswered if agencies with dissimilar functional focus engage differently in FB. Based on a large-scale world-first empirical analysis of over 147 federal government FB pages, this article presents insights on online participation in terms of government posts and citizen interactions observed over three years (2013-2016) across different types of agencies (i.e. operational, policy, regulatory and specialist). Preliminary findings show convincing agency and audience engagement on FB pages as a platform for sharing and communicating. However there are differences among the agencies in terms of audience and agency engagement relative to post activity and interactions. The findings have implications for federal government agencies, both from benchmarking and capability building perspectives.