The Government’s Hand (and Money) in Social Media

The data is out, government vendors manage to make money helping the government use social media. In fact, one of SmartProcure’s fellow participants in Code for America’s 2013 Accelerator was Archive Social, a fantastic govtech company that helps government agencies archive their social media activity.

Here are the results based on the study of government purchase orders (76 million at the time of writing) from approximately 2,200 local, state, and federal agencies for purchases related to social media. In addition to “social media,” we also searched for contracts related to Facebook and Twitter.

The results? These 2,200 agencies spent nearly $70 million dollars on social media-related contracts over the last 5 years.

Here’s the breakdown, including the top 10 agencies (by dollars spent) for each search:

Government Contracts Related to “Social Media”: $58,415,060

Government Contracts Related to Facebook: $9,029,097

Government Contracts Related to Twitter: $956,759

Click here for more information on government spending.