Investigating the Challenges and Obstacles of Institutionalizing Social Media in Government Organizations

Social media have become a common organizational resource of governments and government departments in various fields. However, the understanding of the barriers to the institutionalization of social media in public administration needs to be developed. The purpose of the article was to investigate the challenges and obstacles of social media institutionalization in government organizations. In terms of purpose, the research is applied, and in terms of the research method, it is descriptive and library-based. Related information was collected by searching the keywords "institutionalization", "social media", "barriers" and "government organizations" in Persian articles and their English equivalents "Institutionalization", "Social media", "Barriers" and "Government organizations" in foreign reliable journals. The results of the surveys showed that the challenges of social media institutionalization in government organizations are primarily the general context of the organization, which includes technological illiteracy, citizens' lack of trust in institutions or fear of communication, and then institutional framework (such as information and identity theft, problems related to intellectual property), inter-organizational cooperation, organizational structure challenges (such as inflexible organizational culture, negative balance in cost-benefit decision-making for adoption, or lack of training and service maintenance problems), challenges related to information and data. such as the validity of the information or the fear of losing control over the sent content), the problems are related to the capabilities of the technology itself. Public sector organizations must manage these challenges by institutionalizing social media, aligning their organizational culture or political strategy with this new set of networking tools.