Overview of Social Media and Africa’s Public Sector

Overview of Social Media and Africa’s Public Sector

Robert Ebo Hinson

This chapter offers an overview of important aspects of how public sector entities across the African continent are leveraging digital and social media channels to achieve various strategic ends, including enhancing public communication, more effectively engaging citizens in democracy and governance, improving public service delivery, crisis communication and management, government image enhancement, boosting internal communication within public sector organizations, and achieving financial goals. The chapter profiles significant facets of the African sociocultural milieu, including some contemporary stimulants and barriers to digital and social media use by public sector organizations across Africa. Overall, the chapter illuminates patterns of employment of major social media channels by public sector organizations in Africa. It uniquely positions the book as helping develop a systematic approach to understanding many transformations taking place within the African public sector landscape, with the view to enriching understanding of social media practices and how these could be better integrated into the operational activities of public sector institutions in Africa. It discusses integrated literature review and textual analysis as major methods for collecting and analysing data for the entire book and describes the overall structure of remainder of the book.

First Online

2023

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-22642-7_1

English