What if @NainaAndriants1, the Twitter account named after the mayor of Antananarivo, is actually fake? After all, what self-respecting politician would retweet critics’ complaints, chain together sarcastic remarks, and encourage followers to turn him into an internet meme?
Let’s be clear from the start – this post was neither commissioned, sponsored, nor reviewed by anyone connected directly or indirectly to the mayor or the City Council.
That said, if we believe the scientific recommendations blog posts hammered out by experts web writers in specialized digital communication journals any blog talking about community management, social media, or any other trending digital bullshit, the recipe consists of three ingredients: authenticity, the human element, and conversation (social).
Authentic.
In my opinion, one of the main reasons why @NainaAndriants1 attracts interaction from the Twitter community is this authentic side… especially for a political figure. Those who knew Twitter before the era of screenshots shared to Facebook remember the mass arrival of political personalities and their “@…2013” then “@…2018” accounts that suddenly appeared on Twitter only to disappear again as soon as elections ended.
For his part, despite an account that shows “joined Twitter in 2019,” the now-mayor of the city has been a Twitter user well-known to members of the Malagasy community since the first #twanapero (meetups between Twitter users). The tone, language, and even ego have survived an appointment to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and municipal elections. His authenticity is now proven.
Human.
Let’s put things in perspective though. The Antananarivo mayor’s office has already tried, at least twice, to officially establish itself on Twitter. First with @mairietana, which consisted of automatic republishing of Facebook posts between 2010 and 2015. Then @Cserasera between 2016 and 2018, which this time preferred automatic republishing of YouTube links.
For his term, it seems the mayor of the city has decided not to create an institutionalized presence of the City Council on Twitter. And besides, why wasn’t the city’s Twitter account simply passed down between successive administrations? One could easily suspect this reflects our national expertise in government continuity.
In any case, things seem better this way. Thanks to this first-person presence with a sense of humor that owns its sarcasm and irony, the mayor offers a human face to the invisible workings of the city.
And if the conclusions of those researchers who worked on scientific credibility can also apply to public administrations, this would mean that by personally carrying the voice of the city council, he would gain even more credibility and trust from Antananarivo’s Twitter users.
Social.
Finally, the Antananarivo mayor’s Twitter account engages in conversation. Believe it or not, this is a characteristic threatened with extinction on social media accounts of many institutions and organizations. The “social” in “social media” no longer has meaning, relegated to a deaf machine for distributing posts.
According to the Twitonomy tool, responses to conversations with other users make up 32% of Naina Andriantsitohaina’s tweets. For comparison, the Ministry of National Defense account (@MDN_Madagascar) which, by the way, does remarkable work 😍 in terms of content, counts only 1% of responses among its tweets. A monologue.
Being authentic, being human, engaging in conversation. It’s likely the explanation for the Twittersphere’s fondness toward @NainaAndriants1, despite its reputation for being merciless and demanding. Unusual, especially with a politician. Yet the result is there.
Of course, it would have also been possible to examine the use of social networks in political circles at a higher level. Although. Cassava is good but not that good.
But what’s the point of tweeting for a city?
Meanwhile, other public administrations have gone much further in using social media at the heart of their public services. The City of Jun in Andalusia has gone so far as to process all administrative requests… on Twitter.
MIT researchers have looked more deeply into this municipal curiosity, and their reflection can be read here. Of course, the idea isn’t to advocate for replacing typewriters in neighborhood offices with tweets. But rather to change the paradigm. Who knows what could happen if we finally thought of social networks as a genuine work tool, rather than a machine for listing meetings.