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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the crisis information posted by publics on the social media platform Instagram about leading fast food companies as well as the responses by the companies and their general use of Instagram.

In two quantitative content analyses, 711 Instagram posts were identified in a two-week constructed time period that related to the ten largest fast food chains in the world.

It was found that negative content about these companies is posted by customers and employees alike and that the negative tonality primarily stems from issues with service and the work environment. The study also showed that the companies are just starting to discover Instagram and have very little engagement with users. None of the companies responded to the negative posts of customers and employees.

The analysis only evaluated posts with negative hashtags about ten fast food companies. Future research should expand the analysis to all posts about a certain sector as well as expand the scope of the research beyond the fast food sector.

The results of the study are a call-to-action for public relations professionals to engage with their publics on Instagram and actively use the app as a pre-crisis monitoring and crisis response tool in their social media plans.

Instagram is a fast-growing social media channel, yet research into this platform is lacking. The findings of this study should be a challenge to public relations practitioners to put Instagram next to Facebook and Twitter at the center of their social media strategy.

This paper aims to examine what type of messaging on Twitter is most effective for helping move social marketing beyond focusing on personal changes to find out what messages help turn members of the public into vocal advocates for these organizations’ social changes. Social marketing scholarship has regularly focused on how organizations can effectively influence changes in awareness and behaviors among their targeted audience. Communication scholarship, however, has repeatedly shown that the most influential form of persuasion happens interpersonally. As such, it is imperative that organizations learn how to engage audiences and facilitate the discussion about organizational messages between individuals. Social media provide platforms for such conversations, as organizational messaging can be shared and discussed by individuals with others in their networks.

Through a content analysis of 3,415 Twitter updates from 50 nonprofit organizations, this study identifies specific types of messages that are more likely to get stakeholders retweeting, archiving and discussing the organizations’ messaging through regression analysis.

Messages focusing on calls-to-action and community building generated the most retweets and Twitter conversation; however, they were also the least used strategies by nonprofit organizations.

Research has regularly examined the types of messages sent out by nonprofit organizations on Twitter, but they have not tested those messages against measures of engagement. This study pushes the understanding of social media communication to the next level by analyzing those message categories against metrics provided by Twitter for each tweet in the sample.