Do organizational differences matter for the use of social media by public organizations? A computational analysis of the way the German police use Twitter for external communication

Using a neo-institutional framework, this study investigates how German police use Twitter for their communication. This is relevant, because the police increasingly use social media to bypass the media's gatekeeping function and attain increased agency in communication activities. However, little is known about their different communication strategies and their impact on user engagement. The analysis is based on an automated content analysis of all tweets (N = 137,771) sent out by the German police in 2019. It identifies different patterns regarding the usage of Twitter between police entities on different levels of governance and in differing types of environments and examines how these patterns translate into different levels of user engagement. We find that German police entities differ in their use of Twitter and that environmental and organizational aspects can explain these differences. Moreover, different patterns of social media usage also lead to differing levels of user engagement.