Do Municipal Facebook Performance and Citizen Satisfaction go Hand in Hand?

This paper examines the relation between municipalities' social media performance and citizen satisfaction withthe municipality. An observational study was conducted, based on four different Swedish national public data sources. Thestudy shows that municipalities' Facebook performance is correlated to citizens' satisfaction with living in the municipalityand with satisfaction with municipal service provision. There was however no significant relationship between Facebookperformance and satisfaction with transparency and influence from a citizen perspective. In conclusion, one importantimplication of the study is that citizen perception regarding whether a municipality is a good place to live in or not is related to the use of social media for promoting the municipality. Furthermore, a relation between satisfaction and citizenperception of government service performance implies that social media could be valuable for interaction and co-creation.Finally, an implication is that usage of social media and the potential relationship to trust, influence and transparency mustbe further elaborated and studied. Overall, our recommendation is that municipalities and their citizens may benefit fromwell thought-out strategies of how to use social media for marketing, interaction and co-creating. CC BY-ND 4.0