JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Social media represents a powerful tool for the dissemination of health messages. However, few studies have focused on how to improve the influence of health messages on social media.

Objective:

To explore the influence of goal-framing effects, information organizing and the use of pictures or videos in health-promoting messages, we conducted a case study on Sina Weibo (a popular social media platform in China).

Methods:

Literature research and expert discussion were used to determine the health themes of “Childhood obesity”, “Smoking”, and “Cancer”. Web crawler technology was employed to capture data on health-promoting messages. Use the number of “Retweets”, “Comments”, and “Likes” to evaluate the influence of a message. Statistical analysis was then conducted after manual coding. Specifically, binary logistic regression was used for the data analyses.

Results:

We crawled 20799 Weibo messages and selected 389 Weibo health-promoting messages in the study. Results indicated that the use of gain-framed could improve the influence degree of messages in “Childhood obesity” (P< .001), “Smoking” (P=. 028), and “Cancer” (P< .001). And statistical expression could improve the influence degree of messages in “childhood obesity” (P= .019), “Smoking” (P= .002), and “Cancer” (P< .001). However, the use of videos can significantly (p = .009) improve the influence degree of health-promoting messages only for the “Smoking” health theme.

Conclusions:

The findings suggested that the gain-framed & statistical expression could be considered a strategy to improve the influence degree of messages. Moreover, appropriate pictures and videos should be added as much as possible when generating health-promoting messages.