The Social Media Communication of Hungarian County Seats: Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube Presence

The communication toolkit of urban marketing has changed significantly in recent years, with online solutions and social media becoming the focus of attention besides (and, in a way, instead of) classic offline tools. In our study, we explore how this toolkit can be effectively applied to cities and how cities should communicate through different platforms. For this purpose, we have created a kind of social media tutorial regarding Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. In our own primary research, we used data from the first quarter of 2021 to investigate the presence of Hungarian county seats on the abovementioned three platforms. For this purpose, in addition to the usual social media data, such as page likes, subscribers, number of views, or even the activity rate, we created a much more complex, professional but also – inevitably – somewhat subjective analysis system. It would be also worthwhile for other cities to use this criteria system as a checklist or to adopt good practices from the cities at the top of the list.