# A Method for Assessing the Performance of e-Government Twitter Accounts
## 4 Methodology  
This paper proposes a methodology for assessing the performance of e-government Twitter accounts. This research is part of a greater project, which aims to measure the relative placement of Greek ministries' accounts on Twitter, compared with the relative or similar ministry accounts of EU countries. Thus, at first, a list of the Greek ministries was constructed. Only similar ministries of EU countries were searched and recorded. This exclusion of some EU countries ministries from the study may sound as a limitation, however the objective is to produce a Twitter Authority Index which could be applied in any e-government context and the specific data only serve as an example to demonstrate the proposed method. Similar analyses could be done to produce rankings of all the ministries of EU countries. The accounts of 56 ministries of EU countries are studied. The paper places special importance in the study of the activity and popularity of the accounts, on one hand, and the potential of the accounts to provide the space within which citizens can form communities, on the other. In these communities the citizens may reproduce the messages originally tweeted by the accounts, and even comment and reply, acting in this way within a context of information diffusion and connectivity. The 56 accounts of ministries of 17 countries were located during 19-28 February 2013. The search started from the websites of the ministries of Foreign Affairs, Development, Health, Education, Environment, and Finance of EU countries and the links to Twitter accounts were located. Next, for each account the following were recorded:  
* number of followers of the account,
* followers per day (calculated as an average over a three months period),
* number of tweets,
* tweets per day (calculated as an average over a three months period), and
* famous words total effective reach. All indexes provide evidence of the popularity and the activity of the accounts plus the growth rate of the activity and popularity of the counts. Total effective reach is an indicator of the potential spread of the information tweeted by the accounts, since it estimated how many people a tweets can reach. After recording the followers, and the number of tweets of the accounts of the ministries, their mentions/replies (m/r) networks were recorded. By recording how the followers of each ministry account mention or reply, the study tries to describe the activity and involvement of users within a community context. To record the m/r networks, an extended survey was done: mentions and replies were recorded using NodeXL for Windows, every three days for a three month period following the time of the initial recording of the ministries' accounts. This is done in order to record not just a random snapshot giving partial picture of the networks. The networks consist of the followers of the ministries who mention/reply to the ministries and their followers who mention/reply. The final networks of followers were constructed in the fashion that if a follower mentions another or replies to another follower for a particular ministry, then the first follower is connected to the second one. Duplicates recorded during the three month period were removed. NodeXL provided only up to 10,000 nodes per account, so larger m/r networks with many followers mentions/replying, for example for the networks of some UK ministries, could not be recorded. In such cases only up to the 10,000 most recent followers per network replying and mentioning, were recorded. The findings in these cases should be interpreted with caution. Another set of indexes were also recorded:  
* the normalized in-degree of the accounts, and
* the normalized betweenness of the accounts within the m/r network  
were calculated. These two indexes provide evidence of how central the ministry accounts are in m/r networks, which is how central they are and how important they are in the sense that other citizens mention or reply to them.