Crisis information distribution on Twitter: a content analysis of tweets during Hurricane Sandy

Bairong Wang and Jun Zhuang ()
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Bairong Wang: University at Buffalo

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2017, vol. 89, issue 1, No 8, 181 pages

Abstract: Abstract Social media has been widely used for crisis communication during disasters, and its use during extreme events has drawn attention from both researchers and practitioners. Although crisis information coverage and distribution speed are important issues, both have not been studied extensively in the literature. This paper fills this gap by studying information distribution and coverage of social media during disasters. To this end, we searched and analyzed 986,579 tweets posted during Hurricane Sandy (October 22 to November 6, 2012). To learn about responses from official agents, we sampled 163 governmental organizations (GO), 31 non-governmental organizations (NGO) and 276 news agent accounts and their tweets for analysis. Specifically, five social media key performance indicators (KPIs) are studied in this paper, including impression, like, mention, re-tweet, and response time, and other variables such as hashtag, tweet frequency, and information type. We also test whether the five KPIs and other variables are different among different user types. Results show that total impression, re-tweet rate, hashtag, and tweet frequency are significantly $$(P

Keywords: Crisis communication; Social media; Hurricane Sandy; Content analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11069-017-2960-x

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