Análise da atividade virtual das Prefeituras Brasileiras no Facebook e seus determinantes

Abstract

Society’s been through changes along its formation, among them the improvement of relations between public power and citizens are observed. Among strategies and communications plans are the arrival and popularity of virtual social networks. The usage of social network as reference to information dissemination turned to be an important behavior. Facebook, while an information dissemination tool, is a resource that enables the interaction monitoring between their users and the audience replication. This study aimed to identify the factors that influence the virtual activity on social network Facebook of 399 Brazilian cities halls selected probabilistically. The factors evaluated were financial (economic income capacity), demographic (population, old population, higher education population) and politics (electoral competition, reelection, electoral participation, gender, age, and higher education of the city manager, transparency index, citizen interest on Fan page and users engagement on Facebook), based on the proposed model from Lameiras, Silva and Tavares (2018). All data, primary and secondary, were collected on available internet bases. For the virtual activity data, collected through each municipality Fan page, the Netvizz app was utilized for manual collection. Fan pages analysis compreend the period between January to June 2019. Therefore, a correlational research was developed, with quantitative approach. For the analysis, a descriptive statistic technique was used, T test for the independent samples and multiple linear regression. As mapping virtual activity results, it is highlighted the images, which represents the main typology of publications on the Fan pages analyzed, and it is clear that main part of users engage with the Fan pages through likes. When verified the difference of average virtual activity of Brazilian municipalities, it was observed that, of the fourteen variables investigated on the study, only four variables from the political factor did not present significant differences on the average virtual activity of Brazilian city halls: reelection, age and gender of the city manager and citizen interest on Fan page. Besides, results demonstrated that, there is a positive influence on virtual activity from five analyzed variables: economic capacity, income, population with higher education, transparency level and users engagement on Facebook. Other analyzed variables did not present influence on virtual activity of Brazilian municipalities. With this investigation, it can be stated that social network Facebook is utilized by Brazilian city halls to promote interactions between govern and citizens and to display governmental information; thus, results point that virtual activity can constitute an important tool on the search for more efficient public politics.