High-skilled entrepreneurial talents are key to promoting technological innovation and industrial development. This paper systematically studies the impact of new media for government affairs on urban attraction for high-skilled entrepreneurial talents. It is found that local governments opening WeChat official accounts significantly increases the inflow number of high-skilled entrepreneurial talents, and this effect is mainly achieved by three channels: improving the visibility of the city, enhancing the level of government trust, and strengthening the financial support for entrepreneurship. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that this effect is enhanced by the video function opening of government WeChat official accounts and a better business credit environment of the city. In contrast, this effect is negatively affected by the fact that the authentication subject of government WeChat official accounts belongs to non-government organizations and the accessibility of the urban market is poor.

The contributions of this paper are that: First, it contributes to an in-depth cognition of the importance of new media for government affairs in highlighting the modernization capability of grassroots governance and promoting the high-quality development of cities. Second, it expands on the factors contributing to talents’ choice of entrepreneurial cities. Third, by collecting meticulous features of government WeChat official accounts for analysis, it expands the research angle of government WeChat official accounts.

This paper has the following practical insights: First, local governments should improve the publicity of talent policies through governmental new media platforms, delivering policy information to target groups. Second, governments at all levels should attach importance to the construction of new media for government affairs and play an important role in information disclosure and e-government, so as to shape a good government image. Third, when talents move between cities, not only should the material resource base of the city be considered, but also the soft environment of the city should be taken into account, so as to achieve a “win-win” situation with the city.