Antecedents and consequences of public administration’s social media website attractiveness

With regard to the increasing use of social media channels in public administrations, this study investigates antecedents and consequences of public administration’s social media website attractiveness, focusing on the local government level. We derive a model based on the Uses and Gratifications Theory and apply a structural equation modeling approach by testing our model based on a survey data of 164 citizens in Germany using social media websites in the context of public administration. As a result, we find that Social Motivation, User-Generated Content and Public Administrator-Generated Content have a significant positive influence on Attractiveness. Moreover, Attractiveness positively affects both Intention to Use and Word-of-Mouth (WoM) Intention.