Crisis management on Twitter: Detecting emerging leaders

Twitter has become an effective communication platform during crisis management. Volunteers coordinate humanitarian relief initiatives that spread effectively through this platform, producing real-time data useful for the civil society. In some cases, this works faster than regular government protocols. If over time volunteers gain popularity and credibility, they become emerging leaders. This study proposes a method to detect emerging leaders on Twitter after a catastrophe. It consisted of collecting 4M of tweets using keywords related to Ecuador's earthquake on April 2016. Secondly, we quantifying relevant interactions in order to analyze the centrality of each user belonging to the active post-disaster twitter community. Consequently, a total of 63 emerging leaders were found, where 49% correspond to media accounts, 12% to citizen accounts and the remain to other entities. Finally, five information topics were identified in the tweets published by the emerging leaders, and their individual contribution was quantified. This result shows that it is possible to identify the specific aid in which each emerging leader focused.