Recently, I am comparing the police organization microblog in China and Australia for my thesis which is very interesting when I collect data to analyze.
For my thesis, I compared “Victoria Police” on Twitter and “Pingan Beijing” on Weibo.

iy7405 by Mark Goebel (CC BY 2.0)
Pingan means safe in Chinese. A lot of Chinese police organizations adopt “Pingan” as the title for their account name, for instance, Pingan Shanghai and Pingan Beijing, which shows their online identity on Weibo. In the meantime, most Australia police organizations mainly adopt their basic name, for example, Southwales Police and Victoria Police. According to my research, not only from the name Chinese police want to show the kindness to the public but also they respond to the public more often than Australian police organizations on micro blog sites.
According to Lu, Zhang and Fan (2015) government communication with citizens on social media can be defined as one-way interaction, two-way interaction, and government involved in social media site to help government collaborate with citizens. This blog we will focus on talking one way and two-way interactions.
One-way interaction refers to government release the information for citizens on social media sites (SNSs). For example, “Victoria Police” mainly used Twitter to publish an incident announcement and ask for help from the public to notice the crime. While “Safe Beijing” mainly provide weather forecast in the beginning of the day for information release. Two-way interaction means that citizens can participate in government SNSs, the public can communicate with government officers online by leaving a comment instead of only got the information on SNSs, this is wildly used on Twitter, however, when I looked into “Victoria Police”, they respond very limit on Twitter. Compared to “Safe Beijing”, Safe Beijing respond citizens’ comment in a couple of hours.
Does this surprise you?

Happy by Blondinrikard Fröberg (CC BY 2.0)
Because I know most people think China has more strict online democracy than Australia. They didn’t expect more positive police image for Chinese police on Weibo.
Indeed, We can not even use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in China. But luckily we have other similar social media site originally from China.

Police by Me5otron (CC BY 2.0)
Victoria Police focused on one-way communication on Twitter, they publish a lot of information for “Crime supporter” and safety tips. Safe Beijing not only focused on providing police related information, safety tips, they also build their Weibo account as a life support platform for citizens. Although it is not professional than Victoria Police, It got more attention from citizens online. I collected one week posts for Victoria Police and Safe Beijing, it showed that Safe Beijing user engagement did better than Victoria Police, because Safe Beijing got more comments, reposts, and likes number than Victoria Police, for example, the average quantity of comments for Victoria Police is 2 compared with 39 on Safe Beijing.

The Ultimate Model Police Car (cake) by Dave Conner (CC BY 2.0)
The content form choosing for these two police organizations are mainly pictures rather than words only. 60% people are the visual thinker, the number is still increasing. People prefer to see words with images on SNSs, rather than words only. Besides, Safe Beijing chooses a lot of videos for their daily post, for the data I analyzed, Victoria police only post 2 videos while Safe Beijing posts 48 videos in the same period. By choosing more forms for the post, it is a great way for police organizations to build a better platform on SNSs to build the relationship with citizens.
Overall, Social media is a great platform for law enforcement to build the relationship with citizens (Harms & Wade 2017).
Compared with their name, their post information and their post content form, which one you think they operate better? Victoria Police or Safe Beijing?
Don’t hesitate, leave the comment for me.
Reference:
Lu, B, Zhang, S, & Fan, W 2016, ‘Social Representations of Social Media Use in Government’, Social Science Computer Review, 34, 4, p. 416, Complementary Index, viewed 6 September 2017.
Harms, J, & Wade, L 2017, ‘Reconnecting with the Public: Police Use of Social Media’, Journal Of Law Enforcement, 6, 1, pp. 1-10, viewed 6 September 2017.