Public sector communication and social media: opportunities and limits of current policies, activities, and practices

This chapter offers a review of the major contributions in the area of PSOs and social media. Our aim is to discuss both the opportunities and limits of using social media for public sector communications. The first part of the chapter focuses on the main changes of global communications brought by social media, on the evolution of social media adoption and implementation in the framework of the public sector’s modernization, and on the domestication of these platforms in such organizations. It highlights how social media can be integrated into the public sector, its main uses, and the changes that it is bringing to communication flows. The last part of the chapter deals with critiques of and challenges in adopting social media for public sector communication, as well as with key future research questions.