Monitoring Twitter strategies to discover resonating topics: The case of the UNDP

Abstract

Many organizations use social media to attract supporters, disseminate information and advocate change. Services like Twitter can theoretically deliver messages to a huge audience that would be difficult to reach by other means. This article introduces a method to monitor an organization´s Twitter strategy and applies it to tweets from United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) accounts. The Resonating Topic Method uses automatic analyses with free software to detect successful themes within the organization´s tweets, categorizes the most successful tweets, and analyses a comparable organization to identify new successful strategies. In the case of UNDP tweets from November 2014 to March 2015, the results confirm the importance of official social media accounts as well as those of high profile individuals and general supporters. Official accounts seem to be more successful at encouraging action, which is a critical aspect of social media campaigning. An analysis of Oxfam found a successful social media approach that the UNDP had not adopted, showing the value of analyzing other organizations to find potential strategy gaps.