by Bella Ogurek
On the night of Sunday September 18th through early Monday September 19th, there was a large storm in Bloomington-Normal and other surrounding areas which led to power outages, road flooding, heavy winds, heavy rain, hail, and some minor damages as well. People reported poles down, trees struck by lightning, and even a tree into a car.
Barstool
Barstool Sports is a well-known account on different social media platforms with anything from falls to bad sports plays. Many large colleges have their own Barstool account where people send in videos that occur at their school specifically. Illinois State’s Barstool handle for Twitter is “Barstoolillstate” and when a storm hit in Normal, it was the perfect time (or not-so-perfect-time safety wise) for college students to get content. This storm post included the caption, “If you would’ve told us a hurricane ran through Bloomington-Normal last night, we probably would’ve believed you”.
Findings
Upon going through the data pulled, I found that “#ilwx” was the most used hashtag. This is no shocker considering #ilwx is a well-known hashtag for Illinois weather and used on many accounts. I also found that the most active account was NWSLincolnIL, the National Weather Service Twitter for the Lincoln area, which includes Bloomington-Normal. Another active account, not though data but going on their page during the storm, was Normal Fire. What these two have in common? They both used automatic posting tools. Normal Fire uses “Simple Weather” for tweets to be sent out regarding weather conditions to notify followers. NWS Lincoln uses “Svr Wx Impact Graphics” which does the same job of posting automatically.
In the graph above, you can see NWS Lincoln with the highest favorite count and highest hashtags during the storm days. I see that accounts that use automatic platforms are successfully reaching the public. They don’t have to wait for a social media person to post about it, especially if alerts come in the middle of the night because weather doesn’t stop for anyone’s sleep schedule!
Above, an example tweet from the storm last week by Normal Fire Department that used Simple Weather Alert as seen in the hashtag as well as the beginning words “Weather Alert”. Below, an example tweet by National Weather Service Lincoln IL.