Abstract:

Public institutions need to inform and assist their citizens in order to be able to engage in successful public relations activities. Public institutions, which have been using public media such as radio, television and newspaper for a long time in the activities of public relations, have started to use social media platforms, which are called new media in recent years, in public relations activities. For this purpose, it was tried to examine how and why the municipalities have used social media platforms in the public relation activities in this study. The study was conducted in the first three provincial municipalities of Turkey (Van Metropolitan Municipality, Malatya Metropolitan Municipality and Erzurum Metropolitan Municipality) with the most crowded population of the Eastern Anatolia Region according to the data of the Turkish Statistical Institute (TURKSTAT). Within the scope of the study, the sample of the metropolitan municipalities, which is determined as a sample, was examined by using the content analysis method, which is a qualitative research method, through the coding scheme created in the context of Grunig and Hunt’s “Four Models of Public Relations” in the Facebook pages. Within the scope of the study, in the context of public relations, it was found that the municipalities have effectively used social media platforms in the context of “Public Information Model”

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