Don’t Rely Just on Twitter, of Course
But there are, if not quite negatives, limits to Twitter.
All the emergency communication professionals I talked with stressed that no single mechanism, including Twitter, should be relied on solely. Not everybody uses or follows Twitter or text messages or will have a smartphone or computer nearby and on. New York City’s Twitter feed, for example, has about 64,000 registered followers (plus whoever is getting them as SMS messages or without having registered). That’s not a lot, relative to the city’s total population. On the other hand, that may easily include a significant portion of first responders and other people and groups who need to be alerted quickly.
“We look for redundancy, diversification, and amplification,” says Cecil County’s Hamilton. “With social media, for example, people share — ‘amplify’ — information where it’s relevant.
Also, Twitter itself can be subject to unplanned downtime. For example, on June 21, 2013, service was unavailable or intermittent for roughly six hours (as reported in the Huffington Post). Back on June 26, 2012, service was unavailable for about an hour, and during October 2012, there was an hour-long outage and hundreds of shorter outages, according to CNN.
And, of course, with millions of people, companies, organizations and others Tweeting, often several times a day or even hourly, it’s easy for a Tweet-follower to miss seeing an important emergency Tweet, since Twitter and the various Twitter clients do not, currently, have an “Emergency” prioritizing feature.
Advice and Other Thoughts for Using Twitter
Be sure to archive your Twitter account settings, along with all your tweets. (There are a few services offering this.)
Keep in mind, and publicize, that people can easily arrange to have Tweets texted (sent as SMS messages) to their phone via Twitter’s FastFollow service, which accepts commands via SMS text messaging. “If you don’t have a Twitter account, this lets the information still be pushed to you, so you don’t have to try following by watching a website or a Facebook ‘Wall,’” notes Bledsoe.
Within the United States, for example, simply text “Follow Twitterhandle;” For example, “Follow NotifyNYC” to 40404. (Twitter’s FastFollow has other options, like just getting the most recent tweet for a given Twitter feed.)
Unless you only expect to issue a few Tweets per week at most, consider having several emergency-orientedTwitter accounts, e.g. one for alerts, one for information.
Have one or more people prepared to follow Twitter, not just your organization’s own tweets and any follow-ups, but also watching for related tweets (e.g., ones that include your “hashtags,” which are Twitter keywords that are flagged by starting with a # in the tweet).
And, of course, Twitter doesn’t have to be just for emergency-related notifications, points out Esther Schindler, coauthor of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Twitter Marketing. “When an organization has a Twitter account already in place for events, it’s just a matter of using the existing media during an actual emergency. For example, @BOSTON_POLICE and @FOX6TRAFFIC often have alerts and emergency information,” she says.
Your organization can easily end up with multiple emergency and non-emergency Twitter accounts. LAFD, for example, has additional Twitter feeds including @JoinLAFD, @LAFDFireChief, @LAFDCrew3, @LAFDArson, and monthly check-your-alarm reminders @SmokeAlarm and @COalarm.
Just remember, like you, the people you want to reach have only so much time and attention to give to Twitter-watching, so do your best to make those Tweets worth watching.
Related Articles:
- Twitter Comes of Age for Law Enforcement
- How to Get the Public to Pay Attention to Emergency Alerts
- Your Emergency Notification Cheat Sheet
- 6 Ways to Get Your Emergency Alerts Noticed
This article originally appeared in Tech Decisions.
