Platform Effects on Public Health Communication: A Comparative and National Study of Message Design and Audience Engagement Across Twitter and Facebook

作者：Nic DePaula, Loni Hagen, Stiven Roytman, Dana Alnahass · 发表于：JMIR Infodemiology · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.2196/40198 · 被引用次数：20 · 研究领域：Social Media in Health Education、Misinformation and Its Impacts、Public Relations and Crisis Communication

Background: Public health agencies widely adopt social media for health and risk communication. Moreover, different platforms have different affordances, which may impact the quality and nature of the messaging and how the public engages with the content. However, these platform effects are not often compared in studies of health and risk communication and not previously for the COVID-19 pandemic. Objective: This study measures the potential media effects of Twitter and Facebook on public health message design and engagement by comparing message elements and audience engagement in COVID-19-related posts by local, state, and federal public health agencies in the United States during the pandemic, to advance theories of public health messaging on social media and provide recommendations for tailored social media communication strategies. Methods: We retrieved all COVID-19-related posts from major US federal agencies related to health and infectious disease, all major state public health agencies, and selected local public health departments on Twitter and Facebook. A total of 100,785 posts related to COVID-19, from 179 different accounts of 96 agencies, were retrieved for the entire year of 2020. We adopted a framework of social media message elements to analyze the posts across Facebook and Twitter. For manual content analysis, we subsampled 1677 posts. We calculated the prevalence of various message elements across the platforms and assessed the statistical significance of di...