Adoption of social media as communication channels in government agencies

Social media has become an integral part of many people’s lives around the world. The main use of this communication channel is to connect with social circles. Social media is also widely used for commercial and business purposes. Governments are also attempting to use social media to communicate with their citizens as an alternative to the traditional communication channels. Nonetheless, when the level of use of social media in the government is compared to other fields, e.g. social and commercial sectors, a clear gap becomes apparent. This chapter investigates the issue of adopting social media as a communication channel between citizens and public agencies (including government departments) and considers a wide range of factors that affect the issue from the perspective of public agencies. The purpose of the chapter is to provide an extensive literature review and propose a framework that organises the critical factors that affect public agencies’ efforts while implementing social media and to provide a list of hypotheses to validate and evaluate the significance of these factors. The validation and evaluation of critical factors will hopefully help the decision makers to better understand the concerns and challenges, and thereby enabling them to concentrate on efforts to propose the best practices to overcome the barriers to adopting social media