City of New York on Twitter: @NYCGov

Abstract

Despite the growing demand for social media adoption and use from large size governing bodies in various industries, there are no identified and recognized social media adoption and use strategies. E-government is not an exception. Many government agencies and officials have created and are maintaining Twitter accounts as one of the communication tools to engage with other government sectors and their citizens. This report will examine how the social network site Twitter is being adopted and used by the New York City government agency as their E-government's social media strategy -- presently and dating back to its inception, and how it is received by the citizens. The analysis required collecting all the twitter messages that were published by @NYCgov from its inception to February 2012, and ranking the most popular messages by identifying the most re-tweeted tweets and categorizing these messages. The study will also identify the citizen-government relationship reciprocation rate, the rate of bidirectional communication, and the social network structure that was constructed around @nycgov.