Social Media as a Crisis Response : How is the water crisis in Cape Town dealt with on Twitter

In our interconnected world, social media is a vital tool for communication in the everyday life of individuals. The importance of social media in society has increased not only in times of peace, but social media has grown to be instrument of influencing crisis. In recent years, social media’s role in crisis and crisis response was observed by many scholars for different crisis. One of the most recent ones is the water crisis in Cape Town, South Africa, which was chosen as a case study due to its current relevance in the social media landscape. The obviously high use of social in this crisis is what this qualitative desk study investigates. This study does, however, not aim to analyse social media as a solution for a crisis, but sheds light on the patterns of social media behaviour. This research thus aims to understand Why people turn to social media in a crisis? Subsequent to this, this research analyses whether different types of users resort to social media during a crisis for different reasons. The results were obtained through applying a frameworks: As the main tool of analysis, the Different Users and Usage Framework by Houston et al. (2015). Assisting on explaining some specific part of the findings, the Theory of Planned Behavior (Icek Ajzen, 1991) was applied. Three main findings were analysed for the case study: (1) People turn to social media during a crisis for different reasons and in the case of the water crisis in South Africa, fifteen usage areas were observed. (2) According to the analytical results, different users tend to dominate different usage areas and (3) During the Cape Town crisis, it was common practice for businesses and corporations to raise awareness and combine it with promoting their business