Powerful but short-lived: pop bands as influencers of climate discussions on twitter

Abstract

Abstract Influencers are considered important in raising environmental awareness on social media. In February 2021, BlackPink, a popular popband, were announced as official advocates for COP26, which was followed by tweets on Twitter. We aimed to study the effectiveness of influencers for climate communication on social media. We analyzed the spread of tweets and the duration of effects over a period of four weeks following the announcement. We found that on the day of the event there were 1518 primary tweets which were liked and retweeted 2600 times which reduced to 62 primary tweets and 209 retweets and likes four weeks after the event. We also found that the influencer engaged a community that might not have been otherwise engaged, specifically fans of BlackPink, but this was short lived. Our findings suggest that influencers are potentially important to raise awareness, but efforts are needed to sustain engagement.