Purpose This study explores how effectively the Indian government utilized social media to communicate emergency information and promote citizen engagement and awareness during the first wave of COVID-19 crisis. Design/methodology/approach This research investigates the tweets scraped from the official Twitter handle “CovidnewsbyMIB” of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Government of India; the authors unearthed patterns in the communications between the government and its citizens by adopting various social media analysis techniques. Further, the authors also tried to examine the influence of media richness and dialogic loop on citizen engagement through government social media (CEGSM) using multivariate analysis method. Findings The results highlighted clusters of words/terms present in the tweets related to COVID-19 combating strategies, guidelines, and updates. The authors also found that media richness has a significant positive relationship with CEGSM, but dialogic loop has an insignificant relationship with CEGSM. Originality/value This study provides suggestions to government agencies about ways to improve CEGSM by enhancing media richness and dialogic loop elements such as surveys, polls, and responses in the crisis communication. Peer review The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-06-2021-0307 .
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