Dylan Shaddox said he wouldn’t have known which streets to take home from work Thursday if it wasn’t for Twitter.

Shaddox, 20, lives in Bella Vista and works in Bentonville. He worked into the evening Thursday and checked Twitter before leaving for home. He found out that a few of the streets he uses were impassable because of the winter storm.

Community members, companies, school districts, organizations and the media used Facebook and Twitter to spread news about last week’s storm.

Twitter is a social media site in which only 140 characters are available for a message. On Twitter, people used hashtags like #NWArk, #NWAicedout13, #ARWinterStorm, #NWAwx and #arwx to spread information.

Officials at the Springdale Police Department posted on their Facebook page Thursday evening to warn the public that Thompson Street between Wagon Wheel Road and Backus Avenue was impassible. Officials in the Springdale, Rogers Fayetteville and Bentonville school districts posted school closings on their Facebook pages.

Cheryl Reynolds, 49, said she lives six miles from Thompson Street in Lowell. She liked the Facebook post on the Springdale Police Department’s page even though she didn’t have plans to go out. The alert would have helped her avoid that area.

Springdale police officials post alerts to the Facebook page about all kinds of severe weather, said Lt. Derek Hudson, public information officer. He cautions individuals not to use social media while driving.

Reynolds said Facebook was one of many ways she got news about the storm. She also gets information about the weather on her phone, but she said Facebook is one of the fastest ways.

Shaddox said he uses Twitter because it’s also fast. Following hashtags helps him find the news he’s looking for more quickly. He said the main hashtag he used for information on the winter storm was #NWAicedout13.

Hashtags based around an event or occurrence can be created by anybody, said Ray Minor, journalism professor at the University of Arkansas. Minor teaches a class at the university called “Social Media and Journalism.” He said he doesn’t know who created #nwaicedout13. He said the #arwx and #NWAwx hashtags for weather information were created by meteorologists at local television stations.

“It’s organic,” he said. “People find something that works and feels right, and they go with it.”

The popularity of a hashtag increases as people use it, Minor said. If someone influential in a community starts using a hashtag, it will most likely gain a following.

People need to be careful about false information on social media, Minor said. It can start easily with one tweet containing incorrect information. That tweet gets re-tweeted, and the wrong information is spread, he said.

Many sources will correct themselves later, but false information generally gets shared 10 times more than correct information, he said. People tend to lose interest shortly after they see the information for the first time.

“Social media helps when you have credible sources,” he said.

Minor advises people who use social media to find sources who value getting information correct over getting information out quickly. He also said it’s important to find out who the original source of the information is, so people know if the information is accurate.

He was watching Twitter on Sunday to see if the university would be closed Monday. He said information about the campus being closed spread on Twitter 30 minutes before university officials sent out phone, text and email alerts.

District officials posted a message on the Springdale School District Facebook page at 5:25 a.m. Thursday to tell the public schools would be closed, said Rick Schaeffer, district communications director. Within 30 minutes of the post, 1,100 people had seen the message.

“That’s highly unusual,” he said. “Obviously there were just people waiting to get the word.”

Officials also announced Thursday afternoon on their Facebook page schools would be closed Friday. This was the earliest the district had announced a school closing, Schaeffer said. Using Facebook allowed the district to get the news out as soon as possible, he said.

The posts on the district’s page were also shared more than the normal number of times, Schaeffer said. Before the winter storm, no message had received more than 14 shares.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.

As of Monday morning, the post about schools being closed Thursday had 68 shares, the post about Friday’s closing had 86 shares and the post about Monday’s closing had 91 shares.

Before social media, districts relied on radio and television news stations to spread information about school closings, Schaeffer said. Social media is a more immediate way.

All someone has to do is roll over in bed and look at their phone to get the information they need, Schaeffer said.