The aim of this CIVITAS Policy Note is to provide a set of guidelines to cities that would like to start building their own social media communication strategy, but could also be very useful for cities that already have a social media strategy in place and would like to improve it.

Using social networks to interact with the general public today is becoming more and more frequent even in the public sector. However, there are some concerns and limitations about the use of such technologies, which sometimes may threaten the usability and the reliability of the information gathered.

At the same time, the potential of such tools is great, and there are several applications exploiting social cooperation through the web. The panorama of the use of social media exploited by local authorities is very complex and varies from one city or country to another: while some cities have been using social media in a structured way for many years, other cities have just started. There are also cases where the use of social media is completely absent.

Overall, many cities are making some use of the social media (mainly Facebook, Twitter and YouTube), but only few are doing it with a proper and well-defined strategy.

The Policy Note, produced by the CIVITAS Wiki project, is available to download below.