Author Description

This report features the results of the project, “Social Media for Traffic Safety,” which was conducted by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Volpe Center (Volpe) for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) under the National Cooperative Research and Evaluation Program (NCREP). The study researched how State Highway Safety Offices (SHSOs) are using social media and the opportunities, benefits, and challenges social media presents. While social media continues to rapidly evolve, this report looks at the current state of the practice of SHSO social media, including new and creative ways SHSOs are sharing information, and how these activities are being measured or tracked.Social media as a communications tool is growing in importance to the public safety community as they work to share meaningful and even life-saving information with their target audiences. Volpe developed this project to support NHTSA and GHSA in better understanding social media’s evolving role in highway safety through an informative review that was both qualitative and quantitative. The study used publicly available data from the Twitter and Facebook accounts accessible from SHSO website homepages and paired the data with information collected from interviews with the 10 NHTSA Regional Offices and a sample of 9 SHSOs. Together, the data analysis and discussions provided insight into the multi-dimensional processes used by SHSOs to create engaging, safety-focused social media.The project team conducted a series of analyses using both quantitative and qualitative data to explore three key areas: (1) What current SHSO social media looks like; (2) How SHSOs’ social media approaches vary; and (3) How social media is being measured or tracked. To address these areas, this report describes the methodology used to collect this information along with the quantitative and qualitative analytical results. This report aims to increase the u