Social Media in Emergency Response
Topic Collection
February 28, 2018

The use and impact of social media platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and YouTube) has skyrocketed over the past decade and has significantly supplemented—if not nearly replaced—more traditional means of communication in many areas of the U.S.. There are two primary ways that emergency managers engage in social media: posting information for public knowledge (e.g., road closures, shelter locations, and weather updates) and gleaning information to help allocate resources. Recent disasters have highlighted the level to which survivors and responders use social media to communicate about issues such as: their status and location, the effect of the disaster on their surroundings, where and how to locate shelter and supplies, how to report to areas that need volunteer support (and how to make donations over the internet), and strategies for obtaining medical care. In addition to building community relationships and setting expectations pre-disaster, planners can use social media to identify and monitor potential threats to public health, and communicate with residents about threats (e.g., infectious disease), pending incidents (e.g., severe weather), and the location and availability of services (e.g., shelters and points of distribution). Tools such as crowdsourcing (collecting information from a large group of people via the Internet) and data mining bolster these efforts. Because the nature of social media changes so frequently and is used for a wide variety of purposes, the ASPR TRACIE Team narrowed our search results to include lessons learned and promising practices from incidents within the past decade and actionable resources specific to our audience.

We understand that lessons are still being collated from recent events (e.g., mass violence incidents, hurricanes, and wildfires). We encourage you to share your resources with us for consideration; we will update this Topic Collection as new resources are published.  

Access the following ASPR TRACIE Topic Collections for additional, related information: Communication Systems; Cybersecurity; Emergency Public Information and Warning/ Risk Communications; Information Sharing; and Virtual Medical Care.

Each resource in this Topic Collection is placed into one or more of the following categories (click on the category name to be taken directly to that set of resources). Resources marked with an asterisk (*) appear in more than one category.