Enacting Social Media Success in Local Public Administrations: An Empirical Analysis of Organizational, Institutional, and Contextual Factors

The diffusion of social media among public administrations as tools to promote their relationship with society has grown in an unstoppable way over the last decade and a half. This phenomenon has created a field of research... [ view full abstract ]

The diffusion of social media among public administrations as tools to promote their relationship with society has grown in an unstoppable way over the last decade and a half. This phenomenon has created a field of research that seeks to understand the adoption processes and analyze their impact on the public sphere. The analysis and comprehension of this process is a nascent challenge that demands to be addressed by political scientists and public administration scholars. The aim of this paper is to identify the factors that make social media successful in Spanish local governments. This article proposes a new model of analysis that takes into account previous works developed within the “Enacting Electronic Government Success” framework (Gil-Garcia, 2012) and “Technology Enactment Framework” (Fountain, 2001). The results that derive from a survey and a statistical analysis validate the model in a preliminary way, showing a direct relationship between organizational, institutional and environmental factors and the successful use of social media in local governments. Consequently, this study contributes to advancing this research field by proposing an analytical model that has not existed to date and that opens up new ways of undertaking comparative studies in other administrative contexts and layers of government. At the same time, the results of this study provide interesting findings that help understand success factors in the diffusion of social media in public administrations.