Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jun 16, 2020
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 16, 2020 - Aug 11, 2020
Date Accepted: Jan 19, 2021
Date Submitted to PubMed: Jan 22, 2021
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
What drives citizen engagement in government TikTok during public health emergencies: The case of COVID-19
ABSTRACT
Background:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, citizen engagement on social media platforms has enabled public health departments to increase the speed of health information dissemination while improving public trust and transparency of government activities. Although benefits are evident, especially relating to information and service delivery, how to maintain and enhance these effects still remains unclear.
Objective:
This study improves this uncertainty by investigating what drives citizens to engage in the TikTok account of the National Health Commission of China during public health emergencies. In analyzing the content of 355 COVID-19 related short videos scraped from this account.
Methods:
We used web crawler to collect the short videos information from Healthy China account on Tik Tok, including the video’s title text, number of likes, number of shares, number of comments, and length. We built a conceptual model to predict citizen participation, and empirically test it with negative binominal regression approach.
Results:
Results show that shorter videos increase the number of likes and comments received. Interestingly, the longer a video’s title, the more reposts, likes and comments it receives. In comparison to content about appreciation for front-line emergency services, the content of governments’ handling and guidance for stakeholders during the pandemic is reposted most often, however latest news about the COVID-19 crisis receives fewer likes. Importantly, longer videos with positive titles acquire more likes and comments from citizens. For short videos related to the government’s handling and guidance for stakeholders, positive titles receive more reposts.
Conclusions:
To promote citizen engagement with TikTok videos, public health departments should create shorter videos with longer titles, while the content should involve government’s handling and guidance for stakeholders. In addition, video producers should fully consider the title’s emotional valence and align it positively with content type and video length.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.