# A Method for Assessing the Performance of e-Government Twitter Accounts
## 1 Introduction  
The microblogging platform Twitter is rapidly expanding since its official launch in 2006. As of December 2015, the estimated total number of Twitter registered users exceeds 1.3 billion who, in total, post an average of 500 million tweets per day, while hundreds of millions of Twitter users login daily [1]. Twitter allows users to share information via short messages of 140 characters [2]. A percentage of 63% of Twitter users say that it is a source of news for them [1], thus Twitter is becoming an essential part of electronic communication for governments [3, 4]. Governments may use Twitter to disseminate information, to offer updates about the government, to alert users to emergencies, to connect with the public, to listen to the voice of citizens, to build relationships and to provide access to services [5, 6]. The dialogic nature of Twitter [7] that enables real-time, two-way communication among users allows governments to create online communities that defy organizational boundaries and traditional communication, reach and transform citizens from passive recipients of digital information and services to active participants who monitor administrative activities and administrative requests, and take part in the formation of consensus on specific issues [6, 8, 9]. However, few government organizations are truly embracing all that Twitter and other social media have to offer as they are using them only to provide information and rarely to promote dialogue and consultation [5, 10, 11]. Content that does not drive comments is ineffective. Therefore, governments, in order to use Twitter effectively and give citizens another way to participate in government, have to realize that they can leverage the power of the crowd to collect real-time feedback and to create and spread messages and shift from using Twitter as one-way information platform to a two-way communication channel [12].  
In the chaos of Twitter and other social networks, a few accounts (opinion leaders, influential people, key players) exist who have a lot of influence on the others' opinions [13]; they can act as intermediaries to accelerate or stop the spread of information [14], they start major conversations, or gather content from many conversations [15]. Some popular accounts of real-life celebrities, politicians, and news media have enormous numbers of followers while the majority have only a few [16] and the average number of followers in Twitter is 208 [1]. The same happens at the following action. Some users follow thousands, while others follow only a few [17], and a significant percentage of 44% have created a Twitter account and has never sent a tweet [1]. Thus, the majority of Twitter users have no influence. In previous studies on Twitter, a variety of characteristics, both personal and social, have been used to identify influencers and each study measures influence from different aspects [18; 19; 20; 21; 22; 23]. In this vein, a question that arises is which Twitter accounts are influential and how influence is measured?  
This research proposes a method to assess the influence of e-government agencies, taking into account the concepts of activity of the accounts and community formation among followers. It then uses an idea initially introduced to assess blog influence. It records the accounts of 56 ministries of EU countries. The choice of this level of analysis may provide evidence and a description of a first, nationwide, and more general level of e-government, while analysis could not be limited to this particular level. In this paper, the analysis is restricted to the Twitter accounts of ministries for comparison of several countries with a diverse e-government adoption level.