How Health Communication via Tik Tok Makes a Difference: A Content Analysis of Tik Tok Accounts Run by Chinese Provincial Health Committees

Abstract

During the last two decades, social media has immersed itself into all facets of our personal and professional lives. The healthcare sector is no exception, with public health departments now capitalizing on the benefits that social media offers when delivering healthcare education and communication with citizens. Provincial Health Committees (PHCs) in China have begun to adopt the micro-video sharing platform, Tik Tok, to engage with local residents and communicate health-related information. This study investigates the status quo of official Tik Tok accounts managed by PHCs in mainland China. In total, 31 PHC accounts were analyzed during August 2019, while the top 100 most liked micro-videos were examined using content analysis. Coding included three major aspects: Quantified Impact, Video Content, and Video Form. 45.2% (n = 14) of PHCs had official Tik Tok accounts. A limited number of accounts (n = 2) were yet to upload a micro-video, while most (n = 9) had uploaded their first micro-video during 2019. For the top 100 most liked micro-videos, a sharp difference was observed in terms of number of Likes, Comments and Reposts. Videos containing cartoons or documentary-style content were most frequently watched by citizens. Similarly, content that promoted professional health or provided knowledge of diseases was frequently viewed. Content containing original music, formal mandarin language, subtitles, and which lasted less than 60 s, were most frequently followed. It is considered a missed opportunity that most PHCs struggle to take advantage of the Tik Tok platform, especially given its growing popularity and daily increase in account creation.

Let’s dance the news! How the news media are adapting to the logic of TikTok

“…The identification sheet (Appendix 1) was applied to obtain global data on engagement, management, frequency and volume of publication. Subsequently, we performed a content analysis on the sheet (Appendix 2) -designed ad hoc after an initial tentative analysis and the pre-test coding, making reference to previous research on TikTok (Serrano et al, 2020;Zhu et al, 2019) -with the 184 publications that made up the sample. Aspects of engagement, use of mentions and hashtags, elements and resources employed in editing, use of audio, purpose and theme of content, as well as aspects of format were addressed.…”

“…The platform has been scarcely explored in academic research due to its novelty, although characteristic features (Feng et al, 2019;Nie et al, 2019), effects on the audience (Fang et al, 2019;Ma et al, 2019) and its application in specific areas such as health communication (Zhu et al, 2019), as well as political communication (Serrano et al, 2020) have been analysed. However, no research has yet focused on news media analysis on TikTok.…”

TikTok: ¿una nueva herramienta educativa para combatir la COVID-19?

“…En 2018, fue la aplicación móvil más descargada en Estados Unidos, y actualmente está disponible en más de 150 países y tiene más de 800 millones de usuarios activos mensuales. El 41% de ellos tienen entre 16 y 24 años, una población más joven de los que encontramos en otras redes sociales [1,2] .…”

“…TikTok permite crear y compartir videos cortos (15 a 60 segundos) de fácil y rápida edición con una gran variedad de efectos y sonidos incluidos en su galería (alimentada por los propios usuarios) [2] . Una de las características de esta aplicación es el uso de la tecnología AI (Artificial intelligence, por sus siglas en inglés), por el cual, el algoritmo aprende rápidamente las preferencias del individuo al capturar los «me gusta», comentarios y el tiempo que ven los videos [3] .…”

Informing children citizens efficiently to better engage them in the fight against COVID-19 pandemic

“…The use of appropriate governmental communication using comic books, cartoons, appropriate websites, and social media would then make it possible to raise awareness among children about the modes of transmission of the disease, the health risks, the scientific notions of the immune system, the value of barrier measures, and the progress of scientific research. More than texts, comics could be better suited for information campaigns on social media like TikTok [ 23 ] and other popular apps. Ideally, they would be tailored by governments, scientific consortium, and educational experts to reach younger citizens.…”