Social Media for Disaster Situations: Methods, Opportunities and Challenges

During disasters people start using social media as a platform to share and disseminate real-time disaster information to wider audiences. In order to understand the type of information that is being shared during disasters and how communities are using the technologies to respond to the disasters, we analyze two-different case studies on natural disasters using Twitter as a platform for gathering and sharing information. In both the case studies, we applied different content analysis methods, both manual and automated, to analyze the valuable information from the user-generated content produced during disaster situations. Based on our findings, we argue that social media platforms are facilitating collective level situation awareness among people and valuable information for disaster management agencies. However, in order to integrate social media in organizational work routines and processes, understanding the opportunities along with challenges is a key.