Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to determine the demographic, resource and internal competition factors that influence both the level of citizen engagement provided by municipal Twitter accounts as well as the primary purposes for which those accounts are used.

Design/methodology/approach

This research uses a mixed-methods approach. Twitter data were content analyzed and categorized according to their specific purposes (information dissemination, community building or calls to action). Twitter engagement was measured as an index variable constructed from prior research, and multiple regression was used to determine the factors which best predict both account engagement and tweet purposes.

Findings

The results show that two factors (a multiplatform approach and fiscal health) along with the interaction of those factors predict the level of Twitter-based citizen engagement. Median citizen age was found to significantly predict the percentage of municipal tweets with purposes of information dissemination and community building.

Originality/value

This study adds to the literature on public sector social media use by examining the purposes and practices of local government Twitter use, providing a context for examining how Twitter is employed by local governments for citizen engagement.

中文翻译：

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影响推文目的和公民与市政Twitter帐户互动的因素

目的

本文的目的是确定人口，资源和内部竞争因素，这些因素既影响市政推特账户提供的公民参与程度，又影响这些账户的主要用途。

设计/方法/方法

这项研究使用了混合方法。对Twitter数据进行了内容分析，并根据其特定目的（信息传播，社区建设或行动呼吁）进行了分类。Twitter参与度是根据先前研究得出的指标变量来衡量的，并且使用多元回归来确定最能预测帐户参与度和推文目的的因素。

发现

结果表明，两个因素（多平台方法和财政状况）以及这些因素的相互作用共同预测了基于Twitter的公民参与程度。人们发现，中位数公民年龄可以显着预测市政推文的百分比，以达到信息传播和社区建设的目的。

创意/价值

这项研究通过检查地方政府Twitter使用的目的和做法，为公共部门社交媒体的使用增加了文献资料，为检查地方政府如何使用Twitter进行公民参与提供了背景。