The outgoing Croatian Government – among the most active on social media in Europe.
The Croatian government has the third largest group of followers on Facebook and is third according to the number of comments among all European governments, claims the Burson-Marsteller agency whose “World Leaders on Facebook” report was published on Monday. The study included more than 500 Facebook pages of various executive branch institutions, reports Poslovni.hr on January 19, 2016.
“After numerous awards for communication with citizens via Twitter, the Office of Online Communication of the Croatian Government, as part of the Department of Public Relations, has received another international recognition for its efforts and work in communicating with the citizens, this time for an open dialogue via Facebook social network”, says a statement by the Department of Public Relations.
The “World Leaders on Facebook” study, which was the first of its kind ever conducted, covered the entire communication of governments on Facebook. Last year, Croatian government published 389 posts which explained numerous issues and public policies, and users have “liked” it more than 280,000 times and have expressed their opinion in 53,000 comments.
The statement says that more than 145,000 Facebook users have been monitoring the activities of the Government, which makes it the third largest Facebook community of users among all European governments. The number of people who follow the work of Government has been continuously growing, and every week several hundred new users decide to follow the activities of the Government through the social network.
To further encourage an open, transparent and direct dialogue with the citizens, the government has opened the wall on its Facebook profile to all citizens who come to the website, and not just to fans. The wall thus became a forum for the exchange of suggestions, criticisms and opinions which aims to increase citizens’ participation in political processes. The same survey of the international agency has shown that the Croatian Government is one of the most popular and most accessible governments in Europe.
The study particularly pointed out the efforts of the online communication team in 2015, which was available to citizens every day from 9 am to 10 pm. They have answered over 8,300 citizens’ queries. Posts published by the Government have been read 29 million times, and on average more than 5,500 users have in some way interacted with the Facebook page of the Croatian Government every day.
