In the past decade, social media has changed the way society communicates. Just on Facebook alone, users post around 250 million photos per day, as are 500 million tweets posted on Twitter (Omand, 2012). Nearly seven hours of footage is uploaded to YouTube each second, in up to 76 different languages (Brooking, 2016). There are four billion videos viewed by the public per day on YouTube (Omand, 2012).
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| Credit: socialmediatoday.com |
Social Media Strategy
In 2010, the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) introduced an Engage: Digital and Social Media for the Police Service report, which outlined the ACPO (Association of Chief Police Officers) strategy on the use of social media to engage with the public. The report introduces principles of credibility, consistency, and responsiveness of front line officers when interacting with the public through social media networks (NPIA, 2010). However, there are other areas of police interest in social media outside of scope of the Engage document. These are, for example, social media as a source of intelligence, real time information about road accidents, environmental disasters such as floods, and interest in protecting public from harm on internet, such as child exploitation. Social media can also serve as a valuable tool for knowledge sharing within policing organisations (Crump, 2011). Research suggests that some social networking sites are more efficient in spreading the message out – such as Twitter, while some (Facebook) are better for public engagement (Crump, 2011).
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| Credit: andrewjonas.wordpress.com |
Information Diffusion
For police forces to be effective in connecting with general
public and engage in mutual communication via social media, it is important to
understand how the diffusion of information using social media networks works.
It can help answer questions such as how to reach larger number of citizens,
how many people read those messages, or, why some messages are forwarded and
retweeted and some are not (van de Velde, 2014). Research found that ‘URLs or
use of informal communication increases chances of message forwarding’ (van de
Velde, 2014).  |
| Credit: twtdominator.com |
The results have shown that both the user and message matter. Users, who are popular and active are more influential (Weng et al, 2013). A web link for further information increases visibility, as does relevant hashtag, and also the content of the message is as important. Messages about, for example, missing person would spread much quicker than some traffic information (van de Velde,2014).
Weng et al. argues that while ‘triadic closure’ (a principle where two individuals with mutual friends have a higher than random chance to establish a link) is a dominant mechanism for social network evolution, it is only effective as a starting point in user’s lifetime. As they become more active, their ‘links create shortcuts that make the spread of information more efficient’ (Weng et al, 2013). On the other side, users whose following behaviour is driven by what they see, despite being in minority, produce more information as well as spread what they collect across the social network (Weng et al, 2013).
References:
Brooking, E. T., & Singer, P. W. (2016). War Goes Viral
How Social Media Is Being Weaponized. Atlantic, 318(4), 70-83.Crump, J. (2011). What Are the Police Doing on Twitter? Social Media, the Police and the Public. Policy and Internet, 3 (4), 1-27.
NPIA (2010). Engage: Digital and Social Media Engagement for the Police Service. Retrieved from http://connectedcops.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/engage.pdf.
Omand, D., Bartlett, J., Miller, C. (2012). Introducing Social Media Intelligence (SOCMINT). Intelligence and National Security, 27 (6), 801-823.
Van de Velde, B., Meijer, A., Homburg, V. (2014). Police message diffusion on Twitter: analysing the reach of social media communications. Behaviour and Information Technology, 34 (1), 4-16.
Weng et al. (2013). The Role of Information Diffusion in the Evolution of Social Networks. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.6276.pdf.