Twitter data reveal six distinct environmental personas

Abstract

Effective digital environmental communication is integral to galvanizing public support for conservation in the age of social media. Environmental advocates require messaging strategies suited to social media platforms, including ways to identify, target, and mobilize distinct audiences. Here, we provide – to the best of our knowledge – the first systematic characterization of environmental personas on social media. Beginning with 1 million environmental nongovernmental organization (NGO) followers on Twitter, of which 500,000 users met data quality criteria, we identified six personas that differ in their expression of 21 environmental issues. General consistency in the proportional composition of personas was detected across 14 countries with sufficiently large samples. Within the US, although the six personas varied in their mean political ideology, we did not observe that the personas split along political party lines. Our results pave the way for environmental advocates – including NGOs, public agencies, and researchers – to use audience segmentation methods like the methods discussed here to target and tailor messages to distinct constituencies at high speed and at large scale.