Social media governments from innovators to laggards: the case of Mexican local governments with diffusion of innovations theory

The majority of local governments implement social media into their web sites and means of communications without any strategy or knowledge about their advantages or perils. Academic research about how local governments use social media platforms is scarce. Most of the research is focused on services, comparative perspectives or assessment of e-government. Local governments are blind-folded on where they efforts will arrive. The purpose of this research is to provide some direction to the implementation of technology in governments. Based on the diffusion of innovations theory proposed by Rogers we analyze data of Twitter and Facebook accounts from 32 Mexican local governments from 2010 to 2014 and place them on each category. According to this theory and our sample, just one local government could be considered an innovator, four local governments considered early adopters, eleven are considered early majority, other eleven are considered late majority and five of them are considered as laggards. This will be an example of how social media adoption has been implemented on government actions.