Structuring Governments’ Success Factors in Social Media

Abstract

With the advent of social media, not only individuals and companies but also government institutions have started using these new ways of communication. Social media have raised hopes in serving as the Holy Grail to boosting the relationship between government and citizens. This has been attended by numerous recommendations from both practice and research regarding how governments should successfully leverage their social media activities. However, results show that success stories of governments using social media are still scarce. Therefore, it is crucial to critically evaluate success factors and to provide structured guidelines for governments’ behaviour on social media. In this paper, I use the categories ‘strategic embedding of social media’ and ‘effective interaction with citizens’ in order to structure these recommendations. This work is based on my Ph.D. thesis that Jörg has supervised.