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Top1. Introduction
The advent of mobile internet and social media has transformed the participatory and interactive technologies. It has also revived the government-citizen interactions. Social media (SM) has provided an all-new way for communication and information sharing between people (electronic word of mouth) and between business and consumers (digital marketing) (Hajli, 2014). Its influence is found to be ubiquitous, time-consuming and habit forming (LaRose, 2015). This is evidenced in the global surge of the internet and social media usage. There are about 4.39 billion internet users and 3.48 billion social media users as on January 2019 with an annual increase of nine per cent (Kemp, 2019). The popular social media sites globally are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube (Kemp, 2019). The businesses are benefiting immensely from this in the form of improved consumer reach, and in delivery of effective customer-oriented services (Voramontri & Klieb, 2019). It also helps in creating awareness and building trust towards a brand (Ansarin & Ozuem, 2015). Further, faster sharing of information is also expected to improve the transparency of a system (Alryalat, Rana, Sahu, Dwivedi, & Tajvidi, 2017). Thus, social media has an enormous impact on the adoption of any product or service. This potential of social media is gaining attention not just by the private stakeholders, but by the public institutions as well. Governments across the globe are making a conscious effort to use social media to disseminate the policies and implement the visionary projects for the benefit of the masses.
Mobile government (MG), the initiative to transform the activities using mobile technology, has been introduced as a natural extension of the technological advancement in various parts of the world. MG with smartphones and social media has a tremendous potential to grow. The combination of social media with MG services is believed to improve civic engagement and build trust and transparency towards the government. It is also expected to support the various MG activities and provide services effectively. Here, social media is likely to help the government in promoting their services and enhancing the efficiency of interaction with people there by assisting the faster diffusion of these services among the people.
Nevertheless, the introduction of MG had a mixed response towards its success which has resulted in gaining prominence as a potential area of research (Saxena, 2018; Shahzad, Xiu, Khan, & Wang, 2019). The studies have highlighted the significance of understanding the citizen’s perspective before planning the implementation of these services (Saadi, Ahmad, & Hussain, 2017; Sharma, Al-Badi, Rana, & Al-Azizi, 2018). Citizen's attitude towards the government and its services and the availability of infrastructure is crucial in the acceptance of MG (Wirtz & Birkmeyer, 2018). Lower awareness is found to be a significant barrier to the success of these services. Social media being a prominent channel with its tremendous potential in addressing these issues are even used for MG services. Hence, studies focusing on knowing the citizen’s perception towards the use of social media by the government along with other factors is crucial and helps in strategically positioning these MG services (Al-Aufi, Al-Harthi, AlHinai, Al-Salti, & Al-Badi, 2017).
Further, the Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) theory reflects on the innovation characteristics such a relative advantage, ease of use, compatibility, and image which tends to persuade the user in adopting any new innovation. The DOI has been proved as a vital theory in explaining the adoption characteristics of any technology. Though, few studies on MG have adopted DOI theory the literature on the same is scarce and requires further exploration (Mandari, Chong, & Wye, 2017; Saadi et al., 2017). Furthermore, studies have also highlighted the need to integrate various technology adoption theories to have a broader understanding on MG adoption. Though literature is available on MG it is believed to be insufficient in providing a complete essence of adoption behaviour (Liu et al., 2014; Saadi et al., 2017).