Twitter is undoubtedly a hugely important means of communication for any organization, even staid and traditional city governments.  There are ways of using the platform well, however, as new research from Penn State illustrates.

The study found that the more tweets municipalities sent out, the less likely followers were to engage with the message.  The analysis found that the most active municipalities would often tweet health-related messages, which are especially vital during the COVID-19 outbreak.  The researchers urge a degree of temperance with regards to the volume of those tweets however.

“If you tweet too much, it tends to be— at least in my opinion—’white noise,’” they explain. “In terms of what we see in this data, you want to alter your messaging strategy so that you have more focused, more credible, and more direct messages.”

Drawing attention

The researchers explain how crucial it is for those health-related messages to reach a wide audience, but that upping the frequency of messages may do the opposite.  Instead, they believe municipalities should focus their tweets on appeals to group affiliation and common motivations.

There were also various linguistic factors that seemed to influence the engagement levels of a tweet.  For instance, tweets featuring emotions, such as anxiety and anger, tended to have higher engagement.

“You have to be careful when you say ‘angry’ because, for example, a town government may tweet about a workshop on domestic violence, which doesn’t mean the government officials are angry,” the authors caution. “It could mean, for example, that they’re looking to address domestic violence, or that they are tweeting about a memorial service for victims of violence.”

The findings emerged from an analysis of tweets sent by the 100 largest cities in the United States, which collectively house some 57 million people.  Software was used to extract the content of each tweet over a 91-day period, together with the engagement for each tweet.