Public Social Media Services: A Citizen’s Perspective

Abstract

Social media platforms are increasingly used in the public administration context. Against this background, this study not only derives and tests the impact of determinants that explain citizens’ intention to use social media channels of public services, but also examines to what extent their intention to use influences their intention to recommend these services to others (word of mouth). An expanded technology acceptance model (TAM) was tested based on data from a survey of 164 citizens. The model provides insight into the creation of social media applications of public authorities, for example, by providing four determinants that significantly influence citizens’ intention to use Facebook pages of public institutions as well as their intention to recommend the page to other citizens.

Keywords:

• Facebook
• intention to use
• social media
• structural equation modeling
• technology acceptance model

Notes

1 The term Web 2.0 was coined in 1999 by DiNucci and further popularized by O'Reilly (2009), who defined it as the Internet that focuses on user-generated content, usability and interoperability.

2 Social media is a part of the Web 2.0 and defined as a group of Internet-based applications that allow to create and exchange user-generated content (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010).

3 The term e-government refers to the increasing use of information and communication technologies in the public sector as well as to a general approach to use digital communication channels between citizens and governments (Moon, 2002; Wirtz & Daiser, 2018)

4 The data collection of this research endeavor has also been described in the studies Wirtz et al. (2020) and Wirtz et al. (2016)

5 The minimum sample size for models with seven or fewer well-identified constructs is 150 (Hair, 2010). Bagozzi and Yi (1988) consider a sample to be sufficient, if it equals five times the size of the parameters to be estimated (Bagozzi & Yi, 1988). Our sample of 164 with a total number of 21 used items outweighs the required number of responses (at least 105).

6 We compared the earliest-responding survey participants with the latest-responding participants. The former are supposed to represent the responding and the latter the non-responding participants (Armstrong & Overton, 1977). We conducted a Mann–Whitney-U-Test. As a result, it could be shown that only slightly under 10% of the indicators of the study showed a significant difference between the early respondents and the late respondents at the 5% significant level.

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by the German Research Institute for Public Administration (FÖV).

Notes on contributors

Bernd W. Wirtz

Professor Dr. Bernd W. Wirtz holds the Chair for Information and Communication Management at the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer, Germany. Email: [email protected]

Paul F. Langer

Paul F. Langer works as research associate and PhD candidate at the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer, Germany.

Vincent Göttel

Dr. Vincent Göttel is researcher at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf at the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics.

Marc-Julian Thomas

Dr. Marc-Julian Thomas is a digitization researcher, currently working as IT Consultant at Accenture.