Article Preview
TopIntroduction
To fully understand the real value of external social media applications (e.g. Facebook, WeChat) for governments, it is necessary to evaluate and articulate the impacts of social media in the digital government domain (Sivarajah et al., 2015). Social media directors in the US federal government highlighted that they do not actively measure what type of impact their social media activities have (Mergel, 2013). In Canadian and US local governments’ social media programmes, the measurement was sporadic and primarily intended for operational use by communications (Evans et al., 2018). By contrast, China has an official ranking of its government social media, released by Sina Weibo, that considers the size of the audience and the frequency of interactive behaviour of each Weibo account (Sina Weibo, 2019). This official ranking tends to emphasise the information exchange function of government social media accounts (GSMAs).
However, information exchange does not fully reflect the ability of GSMAs to influence the effectiveness of policy agendas, because the influence detected may more greatly be attributed to the influence of the policy agenda than that of GSMAs. The ‘2016 Zhengwu Zhishu · Weibo Yingxiangli Baogao (2016 Government Index · Weibo Power List)’ jointly issued by People’s Daily and Sina Weibo revealed that the Weibo accounts of the public security bureau, traffic police unit, and meteorological bureau were among the top government units on the power list. In addition to the operational efficiency of these units, the results are also possibly related to the issue attributes of the policy agenda. The willingness of the public to interact with the government differs according to the government’s specific policy agenda. Policy agendas that are well-understood and closely related to the public’s life experiences tend to have the most influence. As public security, traffic, and weather are directly related to the lives of the public, the government departments associated with these subjects are more likely to engage in active information exchanges with the public (Mccombs & Shaw, 1972; Soroka, 2002; Wan & Zhou, 2019). Some studies have also revealed that even when publishing the same agenda, releases with different content (Wanta et al., 2004; Cohen et al., 2017) or formats (Gruzd et al., 2018) are likely to produce different cognitive transformation results. These studies have demonstrated that the theme, content, and format of the policy agenda could, therefore, affect public behaviour.
At the macro level, social media usage in e-government can promote the efficiency of public services((Moreno Enguix et al., 2019; Nam, 2019), while e-government development is also influenced by national culture (Kumar et al., 2021), such as power distance(Vakeel & Panigrahi, 2018). At the micro level, GSMAs as platforms for public knowledge sharing and interaction, the knowledge exchange between its participants is influenced by their knowledge distance(S. Luo et al., 2015). In government-led agendas, high knowledge distance means a high knowledge threshold and makes it difficult to expand public engagement. High knowledge distance also means the low quality of information interaction, which makes interaction bring less useful information and knowledge, thus reducing the effect of public participation (Qi et al., 2021). However, if the task goal is single and clear, the higher the knowledge acquisition effort of the participating individuals, the more creative the interaction in high knowledge distance will be (Acar & van den Ende, 2016), to improve the quality of information interaction. Therefore, in a policy area with high knowledge distance, it could be more efficient for GSMAs to improve the quality of information interaction than to increase the frequency of information exchange.