Social media platforms allow emergency managers to augment traditional approaches to crisis communication. Research on government messaging, however, disproportionately addresses large‐scale disaster response efforts, neglecting smaller‐scale incidents and activities across other disaster phases (e.g., prevention, mitigation, preparedness and recovery). This article offers a more complete analysis of messaging strategies by integrating existing typologies and analysing state‐level emergency management agencies in the United States over a one‐year period. Findings illustrate a range of messages, with response and preparedness being most prevalent. While all agencies disseminated protective action messages, situational information and preparedness guidance, fewer engaged in more interactive tactics that facilitate public participation and interagency collaboration. More work, therefore, is needed to pursue social media's full potential in promoting risk reduction.

Across policy domains, government agencies evaluate social media content produced by third parties, identify valuable information, and at times reuse information to inform the public. This has the potential to permit a di versity of social media users to be heard in the resulting information networks, but to what extent are agencies relying on private citizens or others outside of the policy domain for message content? In order to examine that question, we analyze the online practices of state level government agencies. Findings demonstrate that agencies emulate offline content reuse strategies by relying predominately on trusted institutional sources rather than new voices, such as private citizens. Those institutional sources predominantly include other government agen cies and nonprofit organizations, and their messages focus mostly on informing and educating the public.

Abstract:A key task in emergency management is the timely dissemination of information to decision makers across different scales of operations, particularly to individual citizens. Incidents over the past decade highlight communication gaps between government and constituents that have led to suboptimal outcomes. Social media can provide valuable tools to reduce those gaps. This article contributes to the existing literature on social media use by empirically demonstrating how and to what extent state-level emergency management agencies employ social media to increase public participation and promote behavioral changes intended to reduce household and community risk. Research to this point has empirically examined only response and recovery phases related to this process. This article addresses each phase of emergency management through the analysis of Twitter messages posted over a 3-month period. Our research demonstrates that while most messages conformed to traditional one-to-many government communication tactics, a number of agencies employed interactive approaches including one-to-one and many-to-many strategies.

Findings integrate the fragmented body of knowledge into a more coherent whole and suggest that practitioners might maximize outcomes through a three-step process of information dissemination, data monitoring, and the direct engagement of diverse sets of actors to spur risk reduction efforts. However, these steps require time, personnel, and resources, which present obstacles for agencies operating under conditions of personnel and resource scarcity.

A key challenge for public administrators is facilitating communication among diverse actors. This article illustrates the information seeking and sharing preferences of notable emergency information suppliers on social media who operate primarily within four states. Through homophily and brokerage analyses, two basic communication preferences were noted: (a) bridging patterns in which actors interact with diverse sources of information, and (b) bonding patterns in which actors rely on sources from similar backgrounds. Both provide value for practitioners. A crucial task, then, is to balance those approaches and adjust to the shifting demands of the external environment.