Skip to main content Skip to footer unit links
← Back to all capstone projects

How News Organizations Can Increase Their Twitter Clout And Fight Climate Change

Student(s):

Conor Courtney

Program or Department(s):

  • Program on the Environment
  • Journalism
  • University of Washington

Site supervisor(s):

Viccy Salazar

Partner(s):

  • United States Environmental Protection Agency, Region 10

Faculty advisor(s):

Erika Schultz, Department of Communication, University of Washington

News organizations have historically failed to communicate about climate change, leading to a significant deficit between the percentage of scientists that proved climate change was an urgent issue, and the number of Americans that believed that climate change was an urgent issue. Social media has surpassed print newspapers as a source of news for Americans. Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms and an effective platform to share relevant news. The purpose of this study was to find the Twitter elements that most increased audience engagement amongst environmental news organizations. To complete this research, I interviewed three audience engagement experts, and analyzed ten environmental organizations’ top ten tweets using the program Twitonomy to determine what elements within a tweet drive the most engagement. Findings show that 100% of top tweets included a link or a video. Elements including @ mentions, hashtags, statistics and quotes appeared 13-30% of tweets were another effective way of increasing engagement. Additionally, reposting content multiple times at different times of day with different captions increased engagement. Based on expert elicitation interviews and analyzed tweets, news organizations had a range of styles and strategies for increasing engagement, but all organizations should consistently post links or videos with their tweets, and post content multiple times with different captions. Organizations should also consistently evaluate their own Twitter presence to determine what styles and elements best benefits their organization.