Social media policies as responses for social media affordances: The case of China

•Identifies four affordances of governmental social media use•Identifies fifteen components of social media polices for government•Government organizations show distinct tactics toward four affordances.•Places distinct emphasis on policy elements for responding to affordances

The study aims to reveal how government organizations manage governmental social media use by employing policies to respond to the affordances of social media. The existing literature has mainly emphasized social media diffusion, use and their roles in social management. Little explores how government departments manage governmental social media use. The study tries to accomplish the goal by content analyzing seventy-six social media policy documents from Chinese government departments. The results found that Chinese government departments showed distinct strategies toward four affordances of social media. Government departments presented positive perceptions toward editability, but perceived more negative aspects of persistence. Meanwhile, government departments perceived both opportunities and challenges for visibility and interactivity. Moreover, Chinese government departments placed distinct emphasis on policy elements employed to govern the affordances. Overall, Chinese government departments highlighted policy elements such as employee response, account presentation, content vetting, human resources and scopes of content, but paid little attention to policy elements like content accessibility, account termination, rules for citizen commenting, and financial resources.