Tweeting to Conserve: An Analysis of Water District Messaging During the California Drought

Public service providers, like water districts, rely on effective public messaging to persuade their users to adopt preferred environmental behaviors, like conserving water. As one component of their broader outreach efforts, government agencies increasingly rely on social media outlets, such as Twitter, to disseminate information and, hopefully, change the public’s behavior. This paper examines the social media outreach of California water districts in their efforts to promote voluntary water conservation over a period characterized by drought. It categorizes a random selection of approximately 250,000 tweets from water providers between 2012 and 2022. Results show districts most often are simply providing information about the presence of drought and the need for conservation. They rarely used Twitter to communicate the presence of drought regulations, or the financial benefits of water use reductions. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these results in relation to best practices from behavioral science as well as the use of social media data as a means of understanding government agency messaging.