Demographic Agenda on Government Social Media Accounts: Novgorod Regional Administration on VKontakte Social Network

The Novgorod Region has been a platform for a pilot demographic project since 2023. The local governmental officials report its progress in social media accounts on the VKontakte social network. This case was chosen to illustrate the management style employed by local authorities for online communication with local community. After defining the share of content on demographic topics, the author identified the most popular subtopics and tools the account managers used to engage subscribers in a discussion. A manual selection of posts and topic analysis provided diverse material of user reactions and revealed the feedback tools. The current format for managing the government communities on VKontakte was at the very initial stage of developing a civic debate platform. It realized its informative function but failed to facilitate a meaningful dialogue between the government and the community. The share of demographic content was below 3%: housing and public improvement proved to be much more popular issues. Government officials avoided communication and limited themselves to standardized responses to the flood of negative comments, which naturally generated criticism and undermined public trust. The current communication strategy employed by the Novgorod regional administration on social media hinders communication with the local communities and discourages users from discussing politic.