Social Media diplomacy

We are living at the time of e-government which is the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) by a government to communicate and transact internally and externally with citizens, businesses, and other government organizations”. Canada also uses this method including social media such as Facebook to enhance its diplomatic relations with other countries. E-governance enhances internal effectiveness, efficiency, and economy in public administration including diplomacy. As one way of e-governance, the embassies of Canada in the US has a Facebook page except for LA and Detroit. But the mere existence of Facebook page for each embassy does not guarantee that the embassy is enhancing its internal effectiveness, efficiency, and economy.

From the 11 states that the Canada embassy exists 9 of embassies have a Facebook page. The message transfer, the followers, the likes, the shares and the number of posts can give us a basic clue about the contribution of this pages for e-governance. From the survey conducted it is confirmed that the posts do not have any relevance for the diplomacy, most of them are like news and can be accessible in other media. This can be confirmed by the likes, shares, and comments they have got, for seven days from October 27 to November 3 for 9 Facebook pages there where only 35 posts and they got 6 comments, 2 shares and 114 likes which are very small for government owns the Facebook page. This has a great indication for the administrator to review the content of the page. The other issue is accessibility and how many people use this platform except for the state of Miami which have 47,567 followers most of them have less than 7000 followers like the state of Chicago, Minneapolis, New York and Seattle. Some states like Denver and Dallas have less than 500 followers. The survey can be a basic point for the embassies to look after their respective pages and make a reform to be effective, efficient and contribute to the economy of the country.

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