Government Public Relations in Turkey: Social Media Usage of Turkish Ministries in Relationship Building

Abstract

Nowadays, developing long-term and positive relationships by government agencies with publics and managing the relationships strategically became very important. Social media provides a number of opportunities for government agencies in terms of building relationships and engaging with publics, developing relationships based on dialogue, ensuring the public participation in decision making and implementation. Taking advantage of the opportunities provided by the social media in terms of relationship building between government agencies and publics depends on full utilization of the interaction and participation supporting characteristics and the dialogic capacity that it provides. This study focused on revealing the case of benefiting from the opportunities offered by social media in order for ministries in Turkey to establish a relationship with publics and analyzed whether the social media is used for the purpose of one-way message transmission to publics or used accordingly with the nature of two-way symmetrical communication. Within the scope of study, corporate Facebook profiles and Twitter accounts of Turkish ministries were analyzed with a content analysis method. Findings were achieved through the analyzing social media accounts of Turkish ministries indicated that social media is used for one - way communication by the ministries. Moreover, it was seen that Turkish ministries do not take advantage of dialogical capacity of social media as a relationship building tool.