Sharing Missing Persons Appeals on Social Media: Assessing Community Engagement on Facebook and Twitter

Abstract

Social media platforms are sometimes used for sharing missing persons appeals and disseminating information about missing person cases, which ensures wide distribution. Previous research regarding the effectiveness of social media based publicity has mainly focused on the use of Twitter [24]. However, missing person appeals are also frequently distributed on Facebook. In this paper, we explored how people engage with missing persons appeals on Facebook and Twitter. We manually web scraped 413 missing person appeals distributed on Twitter and Facebook. Variables collected were missing persons' age, gender, ethnicity, region as well as engagement metrics (e.g., retweets, shares). Overall, the public shared more appeals when they were distributed on Twitter than on Facebook. We found no effect of missing persons' ethnicity on engagement levels on both platforms. These results are discussed in relation to shareworthiness and social media strategies for agencies releasing appeals on social media.