women compared to 49% for men, with an average age of 38.4 years. 74% of them work; it can be inferred from these data that the aim is to reach a mature population interested in governmental issues, which can be further validated, given that these same data indicate that Spaniards use social networks to learn about politics. See Figure 12.

Figure 13. Activities carried out on Social Networks

Source: IAB (2018b) en https://www.iab.com/insights/2017-iab-research-hub/

3.4. United Kingdom

The choice of the UK for the study was made after considering that Brexit could provide a particular context for analysing government-generated posts. In relation to the UK’s social network penetration data from 2017, according to frequency of use, 55% of the people in the UK said they had accessed some form of social network every day, or almost every day, compared to 25% of the people who said they had never done so. In addition, it is estimated that in 2017 there were some 35.7 million social network users in the UK, compared to 31 million in 2013 (Statista, 2018b). One noteworthy feature that resulted from the review was that in this case there was a lot of activity on Twitter by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Boris Johnson, which led to monitoring these posts. However, the analysis of his posts is not included in this document.

The first analysis refers to the summit in Sofia (Bulgaria) EU-Western Balkans on 17 May 2018. The Tweet of this summit triggered more reactions than other posts of the Prime Minister during the period studied. Facebook posts were also reviewed regarding the UK Prime Minister’s profile. See figures 13 and 14.