How engaging are disaster management related social media channels? The case of Australian state emergency organisations

Social media is increasingly becoming a formal tool of communication across the world. For example, state emergency organisations maintain social media channels to share information with millions of people. While community engagement through social media has become a trend across the world, measuring community engagement levels of such social media channels is a highly time demanding, and also an understudied, but important, area of research. This paper, through an empirical investigation, addresses the question of how engaging disaster management related social media channels are. The study adopted five indices—i.e., popularity, commitment, virality, engagement, and utilisation—in order to evaluate the levels of community engagement by various social media channels. As the case study, official Facebook and Twitter pages maintained by the state emergency organisations of three Australian states, namely New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland, were scrutinised. The results revealed that: (a) Social media acts as a promising vehicle to capture dispersed community knowledge on disaster management, but it still needs more utilisation; (b) Publishing social media posts with images and animated maps increases community engagement levels, and; (c) Social media posts, with an aim to increase the situation awareness, receive higher community attention than the other posts