Promoting public engagement with household waste separation through government social media: A case study of Shanghai

Government agencies around the world are increasingly using social media to promote public engagement with government-initiated activities, such as Household Waste Separation (HWS). However, existing studies fail to examine how governments can use their official social media accounts to promote public engagement with HWS. This pioneering study investigates the effects of dialogic loop, media richness, content theme, and emotional valence on public engagement with HWS through Government Social Media (GSM). Moreover, the influencing mechanisms are explored by examining the moderating role of social media capital. In total, 1795 posts were scraped from the official Sina Weibo accounts of seventeen Shanghai governments and later analyzed. Results reveal that dialogic loop positively predicts public engagement with HWS through GSM, but media richness negatively affects public engagement. Content themes have significantly different impacts on the level of public engagement with HWS through GSM. Unexpectedly, the effect of emotional valence is not significant. This study is the first of its kind to demonstrate the moderating role of social media capital which is seen to weaken the positive effect of dialogic loop on public engagement with HWS through GSM and mitigate the negative effect of media richness.