DOES CONTENT DISSEMINATION THROUGH FACEBOOK MATTER FOR GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENTS: A STUDY OF KERALA POLICE DEPARTMENTS FACEBOOK PAGE

Government organisationsare generally known to be lagging behind their citizens in the use of social networking sites with half of the departments having little or no presence in such platforms. This study aims at understanding what type of content affects citizens attitude towards a Government Departments social media pages and how they perceive the message disseminated through such platforms. The researchers have selected the case of the Kerala Police Departments (KPD) Facebook page for the present study. Respondents who are post graduate students from various departments of Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala were subject to different type and formats of content stimuli to assess their attitude towards the content type/format itself and attitude towards the department through a questionnaire. Not only will such a study contribute towards the knowledge base on social media research, this study will also help police department across states in India to develop appropriate content for social media to reach their citizens. In order to test the hypotheses and identify interactions between the dependent and independent variables, one-way ANOVA and independent sample t-tests were used. The results revealed significant differences in attitude towards KPD across stimuli and also attitude towards the stimuli itself. Among the various content type provided as stimuli, Hilarious memes generated the most favourable attitude towards the department. The attitude of the respondents towards post re-posting user content was the most favourable. Image/ photo content generates more positive attitude towards the department compared to video content. The study has also revealed that there is a significant difference between the attitudes of respondents who have had priorinteractionwith the Facebook page of KPDversus those who have had no priorinteraction.