To Tweet or not to Tweet? The Impact of Expressing Sympathy Through Twitter in Crisis Management

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of social media and emotional support on consumers’ crisis appraisal. This study uses 2 (medium: Twitter vs. news release) × 2 (emotional support: yes vs. no) factorial experiment. Two hundred and forty-five Twitter users recruited from the Amazon Mechanical Turk system participated in this study. The result demonstrates significant interaction between emotional support and a media channel; messages with sympathy delivered through Twitter help to lower perceived crisis responsibility and retain positive organizational reputation, in comparison with messages conveyed in news releases. Using Twitter significantly lessens people’s sadness and anger. Respondents reading Twitter pages attribute less crisis responsibility to the company, and withhold higher perceptions on organizational reputation and purchase intention. Moreover, expressing sympathy significantly alleviates sadness and anger; respondents reading messages with emotional support report lower scores on crisis responsibility. This study is one of the few empirically-based studies in public relations research using an experiment to extrapolate the effects of social media use and emotional support on consumers’ crisis appraisal. This investigation reinforces the need to consider social media not just at the individual level, but also as a form of communication that can have broader consequences at the organizational level