Factors Associated With Influential Health-Promoting Messages on Social Media: Content Analysis of Sina Weibo

BACKGROUND: Social media is a powerful tool for the dissemination of health messages. However, few studies have focused on the factors that 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 of Sina Weibo, a popular social media platform in China. METHODS: Literature review 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. We used 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 20,799 Sina Weibo messages and selected 389 health-promoting messages for this study. Results indicated that the use of gain-framed messages could improve the influence of messages regarding childhood obesity (P<.001), smoking (P=.03), and cancer (P<.001). Statistical expressions could improve the influence of messages about childhood obesity (P=.02), smoking (P=.002), and cancer (P<.001). However, the use of videos significantly improved the influence of health-promoting messages only for the smoking-related messages (P=.009). CONCLUSIONS: The findings suggested that gain-framed messages and statistical expressions can be successful strategies to improve the influence of messages. Moreover, appropriate pictures and videos should be added as much as possible when generating health-promoting messages.