After a couple of years of testing the social media waters, the National Weather Service has announced it is going to continue to use Twitter in an official capacity to share weather information with the masses.
While you might not see the Weather Service Twitter feeds change as a result of this announcement, it does open the door for partnership opportunities between NWS and Twitter, including the possibility of severe weather Twitter alerts.
In September of 2013, Twitter announced the capability for a list of critical information users, like FEMA, to send out tweets as alerts. “If you sign up to receive an account’s Twitter Alerts, you will receive a notification directly to your phone whenever that account marks a Tweet as an alert,” wrote Twitter in 2013. “Notifications are delivered via SMS, and if you use Twitter for iPhone or Twitter for Android, you’ll also receive a push notification. Alerts also appear differently on your home timeline from regular Tweets; they will be indicated with an orange bell.”
NOAA, the National Weather Service’s parent organization, is already a member of this list, and used the service during Hurricane Arthur’s landfall in early July. The National Weather Service and Twitter are actively exploring ways to get critical weather information to people when they need it.
The push to become more involved in social media is not without its challenges. As we’ve noted, Facebook is a particularly difficult platform on which to disseminate critical weather information because of its un-news-friendly algorithms. And recently, worries have sprouted that Twitter has been thinking of a similar change.
However, maybe the largest obstacle the National Weather Service faces is convincing users that they are a trusted source of weather information — and not the “fake news” weather information that has a tendency to go viral on social media.
Sean Potter, the social media lead at the National Weather Service, is keenly aware of these issues. But he hopes that as the Weather Services uses emerging social technologies more, the trust will follow. “The same research that shows an increasing trend in terms of how reliant people are on social media for severe weather information indicates that the public doesn’t have the same level of trust in social media — in terms of accuracy when it comes to severe weather — as it does with more traditional media sources, such as local television and NOAA Weather Radio,” said Potter. “That trend, however is also slowly increasing toward greater public trust in social media as a source of information about severe weather.”
The Weather Service has grown substantially on Twitter over the past two years. When the National Weather Service began using Twitter in an experimental capacity in May of 2012, it offered nine accounts to follow, including five forecast offices, the western region office, the Lower Mississippi Valley River Forecast Center, and the National Hurricane Center. Today, the organization boasts over 130 accounts, with a reach of over one million followers.