Segmenting and Understanding Publics in a Social Media Information Sharing Network: An Interactional and Dynamic Approach

ABSTRACT

This study segments social media publics and analyzes their informational behaviors during organizational crises. With a public-centric perspective, our study highlights how social media publics interact with each other (i.e., interdependence) and share different information through crisis stages (i.e., dynamics). Following the situational approach to segmentation, we identify different types of social media publics (i.e., influentials, broadcasters, and followers) based on their informational behaviors and their positions in an information sharing network. Crisis managers are recommended to pay more attention to publics with higher influence, namely key influentials and broadcasters. In addition, we try to understand social media publics’ changing concerns by analyzing whether and how publics share messages of different themes and forms in different stages of a crisis. Crisis managers are recommended to customize crisis communication content to fit publics’ needs, prioritize organizational resources, and maximize positive communication effect. With big data from Chipotle’s E. coli crisis, we analyzed the Twitter activities surrounding this crisis over a 6-month period. Our segmentation receives initial support from the network analysis and content analysis on the Twitter data, which lays the foundation for effective social media crisis management.

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Linda Aldoory and our anonymous reviewers for suggesting constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the article.

Notes

¹ The specific number of in-degree that defines key influentials depends on publics’ activity surrounding the crisis. In a crisis where the volume of tweets gets larger, the criteria for identifying key influentials should change. 20 is not a definitive number. The same principle applies to the identification of broadcasters, too.