Citizen Engagement Through Social Media in Small Maryland Towns

The purpose of this case study was to understand how municipalities used social media to engage stakeholders for the selected Maryland towns including residents, business owners, and industries located within their respective jurisdictions, and to identify potential future impacts for continued use of social media. Governments have implemented Facebook to increase interaction, participation, and transparency between local governing bodies and residents. This research examined the uses of social media by nine small towns in Maryland. The primary questions addressed include the reasons these towns began using social media, the extent to which relationship between citizens of small towns in Maryland are impacted, and the social media posts that were most engaging. The research methods included narrowing the scope of the project to a manageable sample group of nine towns, extracting data from social media analytics, summarizing surface level information, and completing interviews. A second round of interviews were completed to compare analytical findings to practical experience of each town. All information was analyzed to determine the social media platforms used by each town, as well as the age, gender, reach, and visits each town experienced by using social media from January 2022 to December 2022. The characteristics of each successful post were determined based on the number of interactions assessed by the number of likes, shares, and comments made by users. This study found the most likely person to engage his/her town using social media is a female between the ages of 35-54 with a preference of news stories related to the town in which she resides. Social media engagement allowed for dissemination of information in real time to many people; something that proved difficult prior to the existence of social media.