Public Sector Social Media Establishment Trends

Mapping social media trends in the GCC

• This article finds that there is a surge in the number of social media accounts established in the Education and Skills Formation Sector in 2011.
• However, it is also articulated that this cannot be causally linked to the outbreak of the Arab Spring.

In our recent blog post Top Arab Government Facebook Pages: How Does Your Organization Compare? we looked at the leading Facebook pages of several institutions involved in the education and skills formation sector in the GCC. Below we show a breakdown of when these entities started their accounts by quarter. While it is difficult to draw a causal link between the timing of account openings and political events that unfolded as part of the Arab Spring or simply the rise of social media users regionally, the majority of Arab public sector social media accounts were opened in mid-2010 and throughout 2011 with some entities in Bahrain adopting social media as early as 2009.