Public sector adoption of social media

Abstract

Social media technologies offer substantial opportunities to public sector organizations for developing community-based partnerships by facilitating engagement with citizens. Yet, public sector social media adoption remains an under-researched phenomenon, which at least partially is attributed to the unique challenges and idiosyncrasies of public sector organizations. We take an analytical approach to examine qualitative evidence sourced from interviews with twenty-four local government organizations across Australia, and contribute to the existing body of knowledge. We induce a range of technological, organizational, and environmental factors that can impact on the social media adoption decisions in local government organizations. The interactions among these factors are also examined. In a dynamic environment where social media use is changing quickly, our findings about social media adoption factors can be useful to many stakeholders, including public sector adoption decision makers, social media and communication officers.