Micro-storytelling and Building Community Communication on Twitter: A Case Study of the @RiotID Project

Abstract

This paper reports on findings from a content analysis of tweets from the @RiotID project. @RiotID is a civic media project that utilises social media to help train civilians how to identify, monitor and record uses of riot control weapons. This analysis looks at over two years of Twitter data, using an adapted version of Lovejoy and Saxton’s (2012) Information, Communication, Action framework to code the sample of 529 tweets. Two key sets of relevant findings arose from the coding. The first relates to the prevalence of community-based interactions on @RiotID’s Twitter account. These findings reflect the benefits of using Twitter as a platform to generate two-way communication, as well as to foster practices of promotional communication for social change that go beyond representational sharing. The second set of findings examines how micro-storytelling functioned on the @RiotID account. These findings contribute to scholarship on the storytelling aspects of promotional communication, social campaigns and third sector social media use