JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

In recent years, sudden public health incidents occur frequently in China, which poses a serious threat to public life. The use of social media by public health agencies helps to reduce these threats by increasing effective risk communication between government and the public.

Objective:

The purpose of this study is to reveal how the China CDCs use social media to improve health communication between government and the public from three aspects: adoption, operation and interaction.

Methods:

To analyze the 134 CDC Government Weibo at the provincial and prefecture-levels in mainland China, collect their account data and extract 1215 Weibo tweets.

Results:

The opening rate of the CDC Government Weibo has increased year by year, and the local authorities have opened Weibo before the central government. 29.8% of the CDCs have opened an account, and among the CDCs that has opened Weibo, the adoption rate in the eastern region (50.7%) is higher than that in the central region (22.4%) and the western region (26.9%). Nearly 90% of Weibo accounts have official certification, but there are dropouts in the specific operation process, one third of accounts stop updating for more than one year, and the number of Weibo followers is polarized, with a maximum and minimum difference of one million; The response rate of user’s comments is less than 1%; Emergency information, multimedia content and original content are more helpful to promote the communication between government and the public.

Conclusions:

The China CDCs are using more social media for popularization of daily health information, which has taken the first step to improve the communication between government and the public, however, equal dialogue, two-way interaction and effective communication with the public are still in improving.