Social media have been established in many natural disasters or human‐induced crises and emergencies. Nowadays, authorities, such as emergency services, and citizens engage with social media in different phases of the emergency management cycle. However, as research in crisis informatics highlights, one remaining issue constitutes the chaotic use of social media by citizens during emergencies, which has the potential to increase the complexity of tasks, uncertainty, and pressure for emergency services. To counter these risks, besides implementing supportive technology, social media guidelines may help putting artefact and theoretical contributions into practical use for authorities and citizens. This paper presents the design and evaluation (with 1,024 participants) of citizens’ guidelines for using social media before, during, and after emergencies.

Social media is much just used for private as well as business purposes, obviously, also during emergencies. Emergency services are often confronted with the amount of information from social media and might consider using them – or not using them. This article highlights the perception of emergency services on social media during emergencies. Within their European research project EMERGENT, the authors therefore conducted an interview study with emergency service staff (N=11) from seven European countries and eight different cities. Their results highlight the current and potential use of social media, the emergency service's participation in research on social media as well as current challenges, benefits and future plans.