Understanding Police Social Media Usage Through Posts and Tweets

This data describes the use of the social media platform Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) by five (5) Massachusetts police departments over a three (3) month period from May 1st through July 31st, 2014. The five (5) police departments represented the towns/cities of Billerica, Burlington, Peabody, Waltham, and Wellesley. In addition to portraying these local trends, they demonstrate a methodology for systematically measuring social media use by government agencies or other organizations. This data was taken directly from Facebook using API’s provided by Facebook. The data includes all “wall posts” made by the representative police departments during this time period and includes data variables such as the text of the posting, the number of “likes” and “shares” (likes/shares represent features available on the Facebook social media platform), information about who performed the “like” or “share”, and comments others made in response to the “wall post”. There are 5 data files, one for each town represented. The number of variables vary per town depending on the post with the maximum number of certain features found in the row (for example, the top number of comments for one police department could be 20 while another could be 30 – the latter dataset would contain 10 more columns per row to account for the maximum possible). The data collected included the time from May 1st, 2014 through July 31st, 2014.