Providing Health Consumers with Emergency Information: A Systematic Review of Research Examining Social Media Use During Public Crises

This systematic review explored risk and crisis communication literature to examine how researchers have evaluated social media use in public crises. Twenty-four full-text articles were reviewed, the majority of which focused on natural disasters (n = 11). Studies were commonly descriptive in design (n = 21), used content analysis (n = 12), and examined the content and structure of messages (n = 18). Studies focused on blogs and microblogs (n = 20); social networks (n = 9); content communities (n = 4); and collaborative projects (n = 3), and the most commonly studied platforms were Twitter (n = 17) and Facebook (n = 9). Findings provide insight regarding the opportunities and challenges related to social media use during public crises.