La comunicación de los ayuntamientos en las redes sociales: participación ciudadana, información de servicio público y campaña permanente

This article explores how local public administration uses three main social networks (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram) with the aim of verifying if the municipalities take advantage of all their potentialities, encourage citizen participation from the communication of municipal activity, increase the quality of public service, and praise or not the government achievements of their political leaders. All this, taking into account the basic criteria of the communication of public institutions and political communication, as well as the concept of permanent campaign. To this end, the social networks of the City Councils of Barcelona, Sabadell and Manresa have been monitored, carrying out a quantitative and qualitative analysis in which aspects such as the calls for participation made by the Administration, the subject r of the posts, the support or rejection obtained through likes and comments, the content of the information (public service, municipal activity and political content), and the presence or absence of the governments and their leaders in the messages issued have been categorized. The results show that the local public administration does not take advantage of the potential offered by social networks to promote citizen participation in public affairs. Although its implementation is still in an initial phase, this local public body exercises a unidirectional communication, with public service information, but also with political and ideological content.