Social Media Crisis Analysis

With technology taking over the world of today, it is no longer unusual for worldwide news stories to be broken through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter rather than being circulated by traditional medias like Associated Press and Reuters etc (Aeur 2011). The evolution of social media have widely changed the way that people interacts. This new form of communication is considered as most dynamic and powerful communication channel till date as it has the potential to spread message to every nook and corner of the world almost instantaneously. Because of its global and real-time nature, the use of social media for crisis communication has always been increasing which can be proved by some of the major crisis situation like Japan Tsunami, Haiti earthquake, Nepal earthquake etc.

Schultz et al (2011) describes that social media plays a vital role in forming and shaping the mindset of general people towards the crisis. People trust social media more than traditional media during the time of crisis. These …show more content…
Social medias also have features of sharing pictures and videos. An event, which needs so many words to describe, could be described by a single photo or a video. Sharing a photo or videos of crisis situation could be more informative as people can directly make a sense of what is exactly happening (Weick 1988). The use of social media has widely helped crisis communicator in supplying useful information to the crisis responder and vice versa. Social medias have been very effective in searching for survivors during major catastrophic events. In the recent earthquake of Nepal, Facebook introduced an emergency check-in feature for a safety check in which more than 7 million people marked them as safe (Wagner 2015) This feature instantaneously sends the notification to the friends in the time of crisis revealing the safety of the