Measuring the Impacts of Social Media on Advancing Public Transit

START YEAR: 

COMPLETION YEAR: 2016

TOPIC(S): Smart Transportation Systems

PRIMARY CONTACT(S):

  • O. A. Elrahman
  • Xuegang (Jeff) Ban

PARTNER(S):

  • Transportation Research and Education
  • Center (TREC) at Portland State University (PSU)

SPONSORS/FUNDING:

  • National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC)
Smart Transportation section

OVERVIEW

This project seeks to develop performance measures for assessing the impacts of social media on promoting public transit. Revolutionary changes have occurred in the communication landscape, and there has been a rapid diffusion of social media use as a means of communicating transit information to the public. Significant resources are being directed to the use of social media in communication, yet little effort exists to measure the impacts of these popular vehicles of communication. Rarely studied is the role of social media in achieving the overarching goals of advancing the mission of transit agencies through increasing recruitment and retention of transit riders; increasing resources and customer satisfaction; addressing system issues, performance efficiency and effectiveness; and improving employee productivity and morale. There is a need to measure the impacts of social media and account for the cost effectiveness of its wide use as a means of communication in public transit agencies. This research intends to extend understanding about whether investments in social media tools effectively achieve their intended purposes.

KEY TASKS

  • Identify social media-related measures for public transit agencies that can comprehensively capture the impacts of social media use on agency performance
  • Review of the research and practice literature to document findings in other fields on performance measures used to assess the impacts of social media
  • Survey a random sample of public transit agencies nationwide to target identifying performance measures currently used to document impacts
  • Identify a list of performance measures that are most effective for transit agencies

KEY FINDINGS

  • Current performance metrics for social media programs are limited and insufficient
  • Transit agencies use social media mainly to communicate timely service information and get feedback from customers through multiple platforms
  • Transit agencies consider transit-related livability and sustainability benefits to be valuable information to communicate through social media
  • We propose a conceptual performance metrics framework for developing constructive social media program metrics that focus on reach, insights, engagement, and efficiency

KEY PRODUCTS

ADDITIONAL PRODUCTS

CONTRIBUTING TEAM MEMBERS

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