Does Citizen Engagement With Government Social Media Accounts Differ During the Different Stages of Public Health Crises? An Empirical Examination of the COVID-19 Pandemic

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has created one of the greatest challenges to humankind, developing long-lasting socio-economic impacts on our health and wellbeing, employment, and global economy. Citizen engagement with government social media accounts has proven crucial for the effective communication and management of public health crisis. Although much research has explored the societal impact of the pandemic, extant literature has failed to create a systematic and dynamic model that examines the formation mechanism of citizen engagement with government social media accounts at the different stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study fills this gap by employing the Heuristic-Systematic Model and investigating the effects of the heuristic clues including social media capital, information richness, language features, dialogic loop, and the systematic clue including content types, on citizen engagement with government social media across three different stages of the pandemic, employing the moderating role of emotional valence. METHODS: The proposed model is validated by scraping 16,710 posts from 22 provincial and municipal government micro-blog accounts in the Hubei province, China. RESULTS: Results show that the positive effects of social media capital on citizen engagement were observed at all stages. However, the effects of information richness, language features, dialogic loop, and content types, and the moderating effect of emotional valence, varied across the different pandemic development stages. CONCLUSIONS: The findings provide suggestions for the further effective use of government social media, and better cope with crises. Government agencies should pay attention to the content and form of information shared, using technical means to analyze the information needs of citizens at different stages of public health emergencies, understanding the content most concerned by citizens, and formulating the content type of posts.