Use of social media during 2016 Kaikoura earthquake

The 2016 Kaikoura earthquake was a unique opportunity to look at how social media was utilized in New Zealand both during and after the earthquake event.

In the intervening years since the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, social media use has exploded in New Zealand. Social media accounts for prominent emergency services and disaster management and coordination agencies have also been set up set up to coincide with this. Many New Zealanders with either Twitter and Facebook accounts now readily utilize social media during quake events.

Facebook also rapidly deployed its Safety Check emergency feature minutes after the 2016 Kaikoura earthquake event, which was widely responded to. While Facebook deserves another article in entirety, today we will solely look at how #eqnz—the de facto New Zealand earthquake event hashtag—was used on Twitter.

Reporting Period: Sunday, 13th November 2016 to Friday, 18th November, 2016 for the #eqnz Twitter hashtag.

Overview

Total Tweets: 125,207

Tweets: 28,607

Retweets: 96,600

Engagement: 265,131

Peak tweets per second: 43 at 14th November 2016 01:20:01

Peak tweet per minute: 375 at 14th November 2016 01:20 to 2016 01:21

Tweet Volume

Tweets to the #eqnz hashtag were heaviest immediately following the earthquake

Emergency Services using #eqnz

Many New Zealand Emergency services, disaster management response, and other government agencies engaged with the #eqnz hashtag in the hours and days following the Kaikoura earthquake. The New Zealand Civil Defence account was the most engaged with emergency service account, completely eclipsing the engagement of all other emergency services combined.

New Zealand Civil Defence: 21,229

All other emergency response services 6,601

Below are the top advisory tweets, in order of engagement. The New Zealand Civil Defence account was by far the dominant account for user engagement (retweeting, likes and replies), but provided sometimes conflicting information. This was important as their advisories were disseminated more widely than nearly all other New Zealand disaster management accounts combined under the #eqnz hashtag.

[Please view the source article to see embedded tweets]

The top tweets with photos under the #eqnz hashtag mostly came from personal accounts. Local and international media utilized many photos of personal earthquake damage.

Most enageged with institutional accounts

These were the top 10 New Zealand institutional accounts using twitter’s #eqnz hashtag whose tweets were replied to, liked or retweeted.

Account #

1 Civil Defence

2 Geo-Net

3 Radio New Zealand

4 New Zealand

5 Stuff

6 Wellington Region Emergency Management

7 Tonkin Taylor Consulting

8 Marlborough Emergency Event Information

9 New New Zealand Defence Force

10 Get Ready Get Thru

Most engaged with personal accounts

These were the top 10 New Zealand personal accounts using twitter’s #eqnz hashtag whose tweets were replied to, liked or retweeted.

1 Richard Bicknell

2 Henry McMullan

3 Grant

4 George Berry

5 Louis Gordon Green

6 Thomas Mead

7 Steve Donaldson

8 Finn Dinneen

9 Michael Michael Trengrove

10 Karen Sweeney's Twitter Logo Karen Sweeney

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