Social Media Affordances and Information Sharing: An Evidence from Chinese Public Organizations

Abstract

The study aims to reveal the role of social media and its influence on information sharing within public organizations and emphasis on the distribution affordance to facilitate information processes. Existing literature emphasized different aspects of social media in the public sector to promote the relationship between government and citizens or provide better public service, for example, innovation, policies, openness, and communication. However, there is a wide gap in the literature to investigate social media use and information sharing within public organizations. The current study tries to accomplish the goal by conducting semi-structured interviews with 15 employees in public organizations in Chaohu city, China and applying content analysis on the interviews. Despite the existing literature, the targeted group for this study is divided into three levels (i) senior-level, (ii) middle-level, and (iii) junior-level employees to get a better view of social media. The study is based on grounded theory for coding analysis. We provide an overview of social media use within Chinese public organizations and discuss five social media affordances involved in the public organizations. Finally, we provide the implications, limitations, recommendation, and future research of this research area.

Social media for government information dissemination: content, characteristics and civic engagement

“…Even though government organizations try various creative and collaborative strategies on social media (Chen et al , 2020; Rodríguez Bolívar, 2018), still, the majority of organizations use these platforms to direct users to already published information on government websites (Mergel, 2016). This is despite the unique affordances offered by online social networks (Khan et al , 2019). As Chen and colleagues (Chen et al , 2016) have noted before: the different affordances of social media (interactivity, visibility, collaboration, etc.)…”

“…can lead to the implementation of various practices by government organizations. Another social media affordance that can be highly effective for public organizations is distributing information to many users at once (Khan et al , 2019).…”

Coming Out Strategies on Social Media among Young Gay Men in Malaysia

“…Examples of social media include wikis, RSS feeds, blogs, and electronic social networks (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) [8], as well as mobile dating and hook-up apps (e.g., Tinder and Grindr) [9]. The creation and exchange of user-generated content are made possible by social media affordances (e.g., actions or features made available through social media browsers or mobile application apps), which include (1) communicability/interactivity (i.e., social media enable the users to communicate/interact with others), ( 2) visibility (i.e., social media enable users to view public discussions, contributions, network messages and connections, and profile information), ( 3) anonymity (i.e., social media enable users to express their opinion anonymously), ( 4) editability (i.e., social media enable users to craft and recraft their communicative acts), ( 5) association (i.e., social media allow users to make the connection between individuals, organizations, and actions), and ( 6) generativity (i.e., social media allow users to express their ideas and experiences) [10].…”

“…This identity curation strategy brings benefits in that it opens up many possibilities for LGBTIQ+ young people, including (1) "[allowing] them to speak to specific audiences about topics related to gender and sexuality, particularly on platforms such as Facebook, which provide functionality that allows for engaging with multiple audiences" and (2) "[allowing] for building and fostering supportive peer networks to engage in selective disclosures of gender and sexuality, as well as building support for 'coming out' among peers" [13] (pp. 10,15).…”

Data-Driven Personas for Enhanced User Understanding: Combining Empathy with Rationality for Better Insights to Analytics

“…As such, from their initial inception through numerous decades of use, personas were primarily data structures-not interactive decision-making tools. A persona profile was a mechanism to organize the data concerning the imaginary person to present the information that decision-makers and others leverage to accomplish their goals of better targeting customers/users/audiences.2 However, the advent of online web, social media (Khan, Si, & Khan, 2019), and system analytics (Baig, Shuib, & Yadegaridehkordi, 2019) platforms allows for the possibility of data-driven personas that are created algorithmically and enable interaction between decision-makers and the persona information. Compared to a flat file, these personas provide an interface to an integrated fullstack persona analytics system, along the conceptual lines of task integration (Byström & Kumpulainen, 2020) that contains individual user data to the persona profile (i.e., from backend user data to frontend user conceptualization).…”