Today, more or less all organizations use social media. Therefore, it has raised questions of what, how, and why regarding the external communication of public sector organizations (PSOs) and their function in a digital (post) society. The research objective of my dissertation is to examine the communicative challenges of PSOs in the age of social media in terms of creating a sense of public safety. This contributes to the knowledge of how PSOs use strategic communication in their social media in order to maintain authority, control, and presence in today's digital society. To examine this more concretely, the focus will be on the Swedish police's strategic communication to create a sense of public safety on social media. In doing so, this dissertation uses a case study design approach with qualitative methods of semi-structured interviews, photo-elicitation interviews, critical making workshops, framework analysis methods, phenomenography, and hermeneutics to collect and analyze empirical material.

The dissertation consists of a kappa and three academic articles. The first article explores the Swedish police's understanding of their social media and the concept of creating a sense of public safety. The second article examines how the public experiences a sense of public safety from the Swedish Police's official Instagram accounts. The third article focuses on how police officers make sense of their public safety communication via social media by emphasizing a participatory approach.

The preliminary conclusions show that the police (at the organizational and employee level) face challenges in relation to their mission and responsibility in how they communicate (not only share information) on social media. The police also need to know more about how the public experiences their social media. Therefore, police (and other PSOs) need to take their social media seriously and make sense of how they communicate about complex issues such as a sense of public safety. This dissertation contributes to the literature on how PSOs and strategic communication address societal challenges.