Listening to digital publics. Investigating citizens’ voices and engagement within Italian municipalities’ Facebook Pages

•A public-oriented perspective to study the use of social media by public sector.•Motivations to become municipalities’ Facebook fan and variety of digital practices.•Propose a digital public typology based on the extension of social media activities.•Correlation between Facebook activities and civic engagement in the municipality life.•Digital publics ask for a two-way symmetrical public relation model on social media.

Several studies underlined the impact of social media in the public sector, investigating the adoption process and uses of these digital platforms by public administrations. This paper adopts a public-oriented perspective to investigate citizens’ voices and engagement within 10 Italian municipalities’ Facebook Pages. In particular, it investigates the motivations to become Facebook fan of a municipality, and the variety of digital practices carried out by citizens to communicate and relate with this type of public administrations. The study was carried out through the administration of an online survey of 35 questions to 1196 Facebook users. The research proposes an active digital public typology (likers, mono interaction users, multi-interaction users, full interaction users) based on the extension of the activities that citizens carry out on municipalities’ Facebook Pages. The thematic analysis of the digital publics’ opinions reveals that citizens ask for a tangible and actual two-way communication with local administrations on social media. Theoretical and practical implications for public sector institutions using social media are discussed.