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Russian Governors in Social Media: Measurement of Online Activity

Student: Knyazev Oleg

Supervisor: Denis Stukal

Faculty: Faculty of Social Sciences

Educational Programme: Applied Politics (Master)

Year of Graduation: 2021

This study is devoted to the development of a theoretically based methodology for measuring the online activity of governors. The research question is how to measure the level of online activity of regional leaders in social networks? This paper is an attempt to bring the research community closer to understanding how to measure the effectiveness of a communication strategy. At the same time, the very concept of the effectiveness of a communication strategy seems to be multi-layered, complex. Here we limit ourselves to a particular question about the method of measuring online activity, on the one hand, and the relationship of this activity with its publicly articulated perception. The key concepts of "political communication", "social networks", "online activity", "indicator", and "social indicator" were operationalized. The study was focused on the social network VK and Instagram. We analyzed the pages of 78 of the 85 governors from 1.01.2020 to 31.12.2020. After calculating the index of online activity of the heads of regions, we moved on to the analysis of tonality. With the help of special programs, we analyzed the available comment arrays for each chapter of the region. We also calculated the tonality on a binary scale: from the total number of positive and neutral comments, we subtracted the total number of negative comments. Based on the index of the online activity of the heads of regions and the commentary tone, we have built a coordinate system with the visualization of the indicators of the heads of regions. So, our two-dimensional model is based on the axes corresponding to the indicator of online activity of the page of the head of the region in social networks and the binary indicator of tonality.

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