Social Media in
Emergency Response:
Emergency Response:
A Study in Facebook and Twitter
Daniel K. Youhas
National Clearinghouse for Worker
Safety and Health Training

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Overview
 Background information on social media

 Technologies that are currently available

 Ideas on how the emergency response

community can take advantage of these
technologies

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What is Social Media?
 Technology enabled social interaction

 Community-based interaction

 Intended to facilitate communications,

influence interaction between peers and
with public audiences
Social Media is the product of collaboration

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Examples of Popular Social
Media Websites

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What is Facebook?
 Founded in 2004

 Free social networking website that allows user to
create profiles, post updates, pictures, videos,

and blogs for people they have “friended”
 Allow users to access uploaded and linked
information and communicate with other users

 Currently has over 300,000,000 active users

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Facebook Statistics

General Growth

More than 300 million active users


50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day


The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older



User Engagement

Average user has 130 friends on the site


More than 8 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)


More than 45 million status updates each day


More than 10 million users become fans of Pages each day


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Applications

More than 2 billion photos uploaded to the site each month


More than 14 million videos uploaded each month


More than 2 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog

posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each week


More than 3 million events created each month

More than 45 million active user groups exist on the site
Statistics provided by Facebook

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Facebook Statistics
 International Growth
 More than 70 translations available on the site

 About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States


 Mobile
 There are more than 65 million active users currently

accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.

 People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are almost
50% more active on Facebook than non-mobile users.

 There are more than 180 mobile operators in 60 countries
working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

Statistics provided by Facebook

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What is Twitter?
 Founded in 2006

 Free social networking and micro-blogging service
that enables its users to send and read other users'

updates known as tweets
 Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140
characters in length which are displayed on the

user's profile page and delivered to other users
who have subscribed to them (known as followers)

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What is Twitter?
 Hashtags
Hashtags (#) are a community-driven convention for adding
additional context and metadata to your tweets. You create a

hashtag
hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol:
#hashtag.
 Websites like http://hashtags.org/
http://hashtags.org/ provide real-time tracking
of Twitter hashtags. For example, you can search #FtHood,

#DCsniper
DCsniper or #VeteransDay
nsDay to find all “tweets”” with that
hashtag.
 Users have the ability to relay immediate information, such as
breaking news from people at the scene, before major news

outlets can cover it AND people can search for this news from
remote locations.

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Document Outline

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