WITHIN INSTITUTIONAL TIMELINES. PATHWAYS OF MAYORS’ VISIBILITY IN SOCIAL MEDIA PUBLIC COMMUNICATION|Dentro le timeline istituzionali: Percorsi di visibilità dei sindaci nella comunicazione pubblica social

The article aims to study the overlapping and hybridization between public communication and political communication within the official social media pages of Italian municipal administrations. Adopting a multidisciplinary theoretical framework that draws from sociology of communication, social media studies, and political science, an empirical study was conducted analyzing the presence of mayors in the social media content of municipalities. The study analyzed 16,604 Facebook posts produced by Sardinian municipalities during two years of pandemic crisis (January 2020 – December 2021). Using CrowdTangle software and quali-quantitative techniques, the visibility of the mayors in institutional communication during the pandemic crisis was investigated, in relation to the reactions of online publics and with respect to the practices of personalization and promotion of the mayor’s messages on social media. The results highlight how municipal social media channels can act as communicative hubs for the hybridization and connection between public and political information flows. In particular, the visibility of the mayor appears to vary based on the type of topics covered in the posts, being more associated with the aims of the messages rather than individual/structural factors of the local administrator.