Understanding the efficiency of social media based crisis communication during hurricane Sandy

Abstract

Rapid communication during extreme events is one of the critical aspects of successful disaster management strategies. Due to their ubiquitous nature, social media platforms are expected to offer a unique opportunity for crisis communication. In this study, about 52.5 million tweets related to hurricane Sandy posted by 13.75 million users are analyzed to assess the effectiveness of social media communication during disasters and identify the contributing factors leading to effective crisis communication strategies. Efficiency of a social media user is defined as the ratio of attention gained over the number of tweets posted. A model is developed to identify more efficient users based on several relevant features. Results indicate that during a disaster event, only few social media users become highly efficient in gaining attention. In addition, efficiency does not depend on the frequency of tweeting activity only; instead it depends on the number of followers and friends, user category, bot score (controlled by a human or a machine), and activity patterns (predictability of activity frequency). Since the proposed efficiency metric is easy to evaluate, it can potentially detect effective social media users in real time to communicate information and awareness to vulnerable communities during a disaster.