Extending Impact Analysis in Government Social Media Research: Five Illustrative Cases

The use of social media by governments is a complex phenomenon that touches upon multiple dimensions, and that involves a wide array of relationships between these dimensions. Existing empirical research on government social media, however, is still mostly focusing on describing isolated aspects of this phenomenon, and falls short of investigating the impacts that these dimensions have on each other. Drawing on a revised framework for classifying existing social media research foci in the categories of management, context, user behavior, user characteristics, platform properties, and effects, we present five empirical cases to illustrate impacts between dimensions of government social media. The empirical findings from the cases extend impact analysis beyond the existing foci, and enable us to propose a research agenda for future research on impacts in government social media.