Police message diffusion on Twitter: analysing the reach of social media communications

Abstract

Social media are becoming increasingly important for communication between government organisations and citizens. Although research on this issue is expanding, the structure of these new communication patterns is still poorly understood. This study contributes to our understanding of these new communication patterns by developing an explanatory model of message diffusion on social media. Messages from 964 Dutch police force Twitter accounts are analysed using trace data drawn from the Twitter™ API to explain why certain police tweets are forwarded and others are not. Based on an iterative human calibration procedure, message topics were automatically coded based on customised lexicons. A principal component analysis of message characteristics generated four distinct patterns of use in (in)personal communication and new/versus reproduced content. Message characteristics were combined with user characteristics in a multilevel logistic general linear model. Our main results show that URLs or use of informal communication increases chances of message forwarding. In addition, contextual factors such as user characteristics impact diffusion probability. Recommendations are discussed for further research into authorship styles and their implications for social media message diffusion. For the police and other government practitioners, a list of recommendation about how to reach a larger number of citizens through social media communications is presented.

Reach of Messages in a Dental Twitter Network: Cohort Study Examining User Popularity, Communication Pattern, and Network Structure

“…This agrees with a previous study [24] indicating that replies were associated with greater message diffusion. Our results disagree with others indicating that replies address specific users, not the whole Twitter network so that those not involved might be disengaged [25]. User popularity and context of reply may explain the difference between the 2 sides.…”

Does social media promote the public’s perception of the police: Survey results on trust cultivation

“…This paper reports analyses of the responses to our electronic survey about social media practices gathered from users of four U.S. police departments' Facebook and Twitter accounts: Billerica, MA; Omaha, NE; Sparks, NV; and Washoe County, NV. Heuristics guiding our selection of these cases included indicators of national reputation as evidenced by social media activity (such as frequency of posts, followers, friends and impressions of posts) along with municipal rankings declaring finalists for the SM Excellence Awards from Connected Cops for 2012, 2013, and 2014 2 ; the 50 Most Social Media Friendly Police Departments in America's Largest Cities 3 ; U.S. Law Enforcement Agencies with the Most Twitter Followers 4 or Facebook "Likes" 5 ; The Best Social Media Cities 6 ; and Top 10 Most Tech-Friendly Cities 7 . Many of these lists include subcategories by police department/city size assisting in the selection of the top performing police departments stratified by population.…”

“…An analysis of Facebook activities of four metropolitan police departments reveals that they employed different social media management strategies, which caused different patterns of audience engagement [6]. Some types of Twitter messages are more likely to be forwarded and shared by the audience than others [7], and police officers' presentation strategies in Twitter messages can affect the public's perceptions of the police [8].…”

“…http://www.iacpsocialmedia.org/Directory/AgencyFacebook Statistics.aspx6 http://www.govtech.com/wireless/Best-Social-Media-Cities-2012.html7 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-top-10-citiesfor-techology/…”

Tweet your #Mo and save a Bro

“…For example, studies show that images and videos increase the attention people pay to the content of messages and frames (Bail et al, 2017;Vasi et al, 2015) and contribute to the construction of collective identities (for a review, see Chapter 2 of this dissertation). Furthermore, previous research has found that the use of URLs or hyperlinking, as a way to provide direct access to external online resources, not only increases message diffusion (Velde, Meijer, & Homburg, 2015) and individuals' online influence (Johnson et al, 2015), but is also instrumental in collective action (Jacobson & Mascaro, 2016;Pilny & Shumate, 2012). External linking is quite widespread on Twitter as it allows users to extend their discourse beyond the platform's 140-character tweet length.…”