Vol. 71 No. 2 (2018): Jak mówić o Unii Europejskiej?
In Search of a New Story about Europe
Hardly Seen and Rarely Heard? European Commission Generated Presence on Polish Social Media
Abstract
This paper discusses the importance of social media as a new channel to communicate European Union activities and policies to the general public. The author examines the fast-growing position of social platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, in the media ecosystem. Their opinion making and agenda setting roles are discussed in the context of deep mediatisation theory – a relatively new, interdisciplinary concept, combining the perspectives of sociology and media sciences. Based on analysis of the social media activity of the European Commission Representation in Poland, the author examines the Commission’s presence in the new channels, within the framework of a new corporate communication campaign, launched in September 2016. The results of the research indicate that that efforts undertaken so far, contrary to intuition, have not yielded a substantial increase in social media activity. However, some promising elements were detected: the quality of users’ engagement with the content published by the European Commission has improved.
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