Abstract

What are the determinants of social media adoption by local government? This ongoing research provides a tentative answer to this question by analysing the 308 municipalities in Portugal. Extending previous analyses of Facebook and/or Twitter usage levels, we examine why local governments adopt a particular social media platform. More concretely, we explore, with statistical analyses, the determinants of the adoption of different types of social media. We investigate the adoption of three extremely popular social media (i.e. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) as well as possible alternatives to those, more popular, applications. Since these platforms have distinct natures and can serve diverse purposes, we examine to what extent aspects such as local government’s commitment to transparency and participation, administrative capacity, media landscape, and socio-demographic and economic factors can explain the adoption of certain social media platforms. The results show that, indeed, demographic characteristics and administrative capacity are important factors for the adoption of less popular social media. Surprisingly, we also observe a geographical difference in municipalities’ social media adoption, with the south, in this regard, being ‘trendier’, or more innovative, than the north.

Highlights

  • Introduction and Short Literature ReviewRecently, much has been written in academia about social media

  • Concerning the adoption of different social media by the Portuguese municipalities, our analysis shows that Facebook is, by far, the most popular social media platform

  • The nature of our dependent variables does not allow us to explore short-term factors such as the characteristics of mayors and executives and the institutional configuration of communication departments inside municipalities. These are factors that indubitably might play an important role in the adoption of different social media and that allow an in-depth study of the determinants of social media adoption by Portuguese local governments

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Summary

Introduction

Introduction and Short Literature ReviewRecently, much has been written in academia about social media. The popularity of social media has captured the attention of public administration and different levels of government By allowing their users to generate and share original content within very large, and relatively diverse, networks, social media have opened the door to real-time interaction between public sector officials and citizens [2]. This has brought some expectations to improve public administration, different levels and sectors of government and, more broadly, democracy as well. In this paper we focus on social media use by local government

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