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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.