Who's talking, who's listening: exploring social media use by community groups using social network analysis

Community participation in planning is generally considered crucial for the delivery of positive outcomes; however, the network structures of stakeholders such as community groups are not widely understood. This paper explores the use of social media, specifically Twitter, by five community groups. In the context of this study, community groups are self-created and organized groups of citizens that form to oppose a proposal to amend planning controls for a specific site. Utilizing the research technique of Social Network Analysis (SNA), this paper seeks to visualize the community group networks, as well as understand the connectedness and clustering of the networks. For the five community groups investigated, it was found that they are led by a small number of active people, which do not attract large numbers of friends and followers on Twitter and key stakeholders play a passive listening role in the networks.