Assessing Social Media Communications of Local Governments in Fast-growing U.S. Cities

With social media ubiquitous in our daily communication, local governments have growingly relied on this new media platform for communicating and interacting with their citizens. However, it is still unclear how to assess the effectiveness of social media communication efforts by the governments. Based on the Lasswell communication framework, this study proposes a social media communication index that can be used to compare and evaluate the degree of social media communication effectiveness among different cities. The index was then applied to the social media platforms used by the top growing U.S. cities. The results show that City of Orlando and New York City exhibit top communication effectiveness in social media. This dataset was developed along with the research.