Well, it is not news that all governmental entities can benefit from social media as much as FMCGs and other sectors. As a matter of fact, social media, being the easiest way to reach out to the largest number of people, should be utilized as a mean for announcing events and news. On the other hand, ministries and governmental entities can definitely make a use of social media listening in order to make sure they receive very accurate insights on what people are saying about them and what’s trending and concerning them.

In a nutshell, social media started off as a social invention that should help people reconnect with each other regardless of distance. Afterwards, businesses found a great opportunity to utilize social media for their own benefit. Banks and financial entities recently started to follow other industries into social media and digital marketing. However, governmental entities still don’t find it easy to develop their plans and strategies to use marketing tools for their own benefit in their own way.

We monitored ministries of health in the following countries across to get some insights on issues that matter to these entities.

• Saudi Arabia
• Qatar
• The United Arab Emirates
• Omar
• Bahrain

Which country invests more on social media?

Posts and tweets mentioning the ministry of health in Saudi Arabia represent more than 80% of the content of the previously mentioned ministries. Actually, the page was tagged in many posts related to a blood donation initiative, which generated more than 19% of the content. The initiative took place on the Saudi national day; which probably urged many citizens to donate blood and share their pictures on social media.

تبرعك بالدم قد يساهم في إنقاذ حياة ٣ أشخاص.#دمي_لوطني pic.twitter.com/GaWKkCtMhX

— وزارة الصحة السعودية (@SaudiMOH) September 23, 2017

Analyzing negative content

Social media listening tools reveal how many negative mentions were posted about your brand or topic. This is an essential function to monitor the services of an entity and reacts accordingly. At Crowd Analyzer, when we ran across these negative mentions, we found the following.

Complaints are posts and tweets that report an incident or a service. Cases refer to tweets that inform the people and the ministry about a patient in need of help. Inquiries are general questions relevant to the health industry.

We analyzed negative user-generated content to know more about what concerns the people most. Complaints, special cases, and inquiries were responsible for the majority of negative posts. Amongst those, complaints were the majority of negative content. It is understandable that only Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Bahrain scored highest for negative content, we believe this is because they received the largest amount of content in general.

Most of these complaints received many interactions, but a few were by an official social account. Thanks to alerts that can be utilized within a social media listening tool, social accounts can react immediately to complaints, whether by taking action or by replying to their followers.

Which country didn’t interact much on social media?

The least active country was Bahrain. Throughout two weeks of monitoring, the ministry of health in Bahrain was only mentioned 10 times, followed by Qatar that was the second least active page with around than 30 mentions. We guess that's due to the populations of both countries. However, Bahrain received some negative posts, while Qatar's health ministry wasn't mentioned in any negative context.

Twitter vs. Facebook; which platform is more popular?

In general, Twitter is much more popular than other platforms. However, some nations are more familiar with Facebook. This chart shows the percentage of each platform's usage in each country.

Apparently, the Saudi culture is very familiar with social media and can definitely rely on it to contact and complain to official entities. On the other hand, authorities also need to meet the people halfway through on their favorite platforms. We cannot neglect how impactful is the presence on social media. These platforms make the government seem closer to the nation and address their concerns quickly and efficiently.