Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jun 12, 2020
Date Accepted: Aug 3, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: Aug 4, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Grappling with the COVID-19 health crisis: Analysis of communication strategies and their effects on public engagement on social media
ABSTRACT
Background:
COVID-19 has posed an unprecedented challenge to governments worldwide. Effective government communication of COVID-19 information with the public is of crucial importance.
Objective:
We investigated how the most-read government-owned newspaper in China, People’s Daily, utilized a social networking site, Sina Weibo, to communicate about COVID-19 and whether this could engage the public. The specific objective of this study was to develop an integrated framework to examine the effects of content frames in health crisis, message style and interactive features on public engagement on the largest social media network in China.
Methods:
Content analysis was employed to scrutinize 608 COVID-19 posts, and the public’s engagement in the form of the number of shares, comments and likes on People’s Daily’s Sina Weibo account from 20 January 2020 to 11 March 2020 to reveal the association between different levels of public engagement and communication strategies.
Results:
We found that although the content frames of new evidence, action and reassurance delivered in a non-narrative style were predominant in COVID-19 communication by the government, posts related to new evidence and a non-narrative style were strong negative predictors of the number of shares. In terms of generating a high number of shares, it was found that disease prevention posts delivered in a narrative style were able to achieve this purpose. Additionally, an interaction effect was found between content and style. The use of a narrative style in disease prevention posts had a significant positive effect on generating comments and likes by Chinese public while links to external sources fostered sharing.
Conclusions:
These results have implications for governments, health organizations, medical professionals, the media and researchers on their epidemic communication to engage the public. Selecting suitable communication strategies may foster active liking and sharing of posts on social media, which in turn, might raise the public’s awareness of COVID-19 and motivate them to take preventive measures. The sharing of COVID-19 posts is particularly important because this action can reach out to a large audience, potentially helping to contain the spread of the virus.
Citation
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Copyright
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