This project is a collaboration between Portland State University (PSU) and the Center for Infrastructure Transportation & Environment (CITE) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute seeking to develop performance measures for assessing the impacts of social media on promoting public transit. Revolutionary changes have occurred in the communication landscape, and there has been a rapid diffusion of social media use as a means of communicating transit information to the public. Significant resources are being directed to the use of social media in communication, yet little effort exists which measures the impacts of these popular vehicles of communication. Rarely studied is the role of social media in achieving the overarching goals of advancing the mission of transit agencies through increasing recruitment and retention of transit riders; increasing resources, customer satisfaction, addressing system issues, performance efficiency and effectiveness and improving employee productivity and morale. There is a need to measure the impacts of social media and account for the cost effectiveness of its wide use as a means of communication in public transit agencies. This research intends to extend understanding about whether investments in social media tools effectively achieve their intended purposes. 

The goal of this project is to identify social media-related measures for public transit agencies that can comprehensively capture the impacts of social media use on agency performance. This project will rely on a review of the research and practice literature to document findings in other fields on performance measures used to assess the impacts of social media. Best practices will be identified. A survey of a random sample of public transit agencies nationwide will target identifying performance measures currently used to document impacts. Gaps will be identified. Investigators will compare and contrast measures used in transit agencies and other fields and identify a list of performance measures that are most effective for transit agencies.