Premium
Understanding motivated publics during disasters: Examining message functions, frames, and styles of social media influentials and followers
Author(s) -
Zhao Xinyan,
Zhan Mengqi Monica,
Liu Brooke Fisher
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal of contingencies and crisis management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.007
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1468-5973
pISSN - 0966-0879
DOI - 10.1111/1468-5973.12279
Subject(s) - publics , framing (construction) , social media , crisis communication , frame analysis , coping (psychology) , perspective (graphical) , psychology , public relations , construct (python library) , social psychology , political science , computer science , engineering , cognitive reframing , structural engineering , artificial intelligence , psychiatry , politics , law , programming language
There has been a growing body of research regarding how organizations and general publics communicate on social media during crises. Integrating the uses and gratifications perspective, the social‐mediated crisis communication model, and the framing approach, our study offers a consolidated framework explaining how and why motivated social media publics communicate during crises. Namely, we examined whether and how influentials and followers employed different message functions through communicative devices including frames and styles. A content analysis was conducted on 800 tweets sampled from influentials and followers discussing the 2017 Ariana Grande concert bombing disaster. Our results ( N = 800) suggested that influentials and followers adopted distinct communicative functions on social media during the disaster. Influentials engaged in information sharing and support exchange, whereas followers engaged in opinion expression and emotional coping. Influentials and followers also adopted specific frames and styles to achieve these communicative functions. Our findings can help crisis communicators understand the needs, concerns, and communication features of different publics and construct effective messages to reach them.