Speak with One Voice? Examining Content Coordination and Social Media Engagement During Disasters

Abstract

Speak with One Voice? Examining Content Coordination and Social Media Engagement During Disasters Practice- and policy-oriented abstract: Disaster relief organizations (DROs) use social media to share information rapidly and broadly. Many DROs maintain multiple accounts on the same social media platform. Each account represents a different operational entity of a DRO, such as its national headquarters or a local branch. An important problem that DROs with multiple accounts face is how to coordinate the production of social media content across these accounts. One strategy is to have all accounts within the same DRO match their decisions about how content is created and designed (e.g., audience, topic). An alternate strategy is to mismatch these decisions. Using Twitter data collected in partnership with the Canadian Red Cross, we analyze which coordination strategy is best for social media engagement. Our results suggest that, during the immediate aftermath of a disaster, accounts within the same DRO should produce content with similar characteristics by matching their content creation decisions. This leads to a 4.3% lift in engagement. However, when DROs start working on helping impacted communities recover from disasters, engagement is 29.6% higher when their accounts mismatch their content creation decisions and post distinctive content.