Twitter data reveal six distinct environmental personas

Effective digital environmental communication is integral to galvanizing
public support for conservation in the age of social media. Environmental
advocates require messaging strategies suited to social media platforms,
including ways to identify, target, and mobilize distinct audiences. Here,
we provide – to the best of our knowledge – the first systematic
characterization of environmental personas on social media. Beginning with
1 million environmental nongovernmental organization (NGO) followers on
Twitter, of which 500,000 users met data quality criteria, we identified
six personas that differ in their expression of 21 environmental issues.
General consistency in the proportional composition of personas was
detected across 14 countries with sufficiently large samples. Within the
US, although the six personas varied in their mean political ideology, we
did not observe that the personas split along political party lines. Our
results pave the way for environmental advocates – including NGOs, public
agencies, and researchers – to use audience segmentation methods like the
one discussed here to target and tailor messages to distinct
constituencies at speed and scale. This repository contains several
tabular files that can be used to query user data from Twitter or
reproduce the main results in the main text of the article.