Comparative Analysis of the Operation of Social Media Channels by 156 Foreign Embassies in Japan: Focusing on the use of Twitter and Facebook Accounts in Communication with Japan

<p>Governments and embassies of various countries around the world opened social networking accounts and are engaged in online communication activities. The use of social media is one of the major issues in diplomacy today. However, the research on online communication by foreign countries to Japanese society has not been accumulated enough to advance the substantive discussion.</p><p>This paper aims to understand the actual situation of online diplomatic communication towards Japanese society conducted by 156 countries, which have embassies in Japan, through a comparative analysis of their operations of social media channels. First, research was conducted to ascertain whether the 156 embassies have opened accounts on the two platforms i.e., Facebook and Twitter. The study identified 89 Twitter accounts and 99 Facebook Pages of 119 embassies based in Tokyo and it reviewed the openings of these accounts starting with the early days of social media. Then, a detailed analysis on the Twitter accounts was conducted – the accounts were mapped according to the correlation between the average monthly growth of followers, the number of tweets, and by the degree of Japanese language used in the tweets of each account.</p><p>The study reveals that more than three-quarters of the 156 countries are present on the social networking sites, while only a limited number of countries use social media as a tool of public diplomacy to communicate to the Japanese public. In addition to major Western countries, medium and small countries tweeting in Japanese are considered relatively strategic in operating their accounts.</p>