1. Introduction
In the past decade, social media (SM) has been playing an increasingly important role in modern society. For the government, these innovative applications based on this platform can release a large amount of information for a wide audience in real-time at a relatively low cost [1], providing opportunities for dialogue between agencies and citizens [2,3]. Social media can not only enhance the transparency of government departments, but also improve public service delivery and public policymaking [2]. Eltantawy and Wiest [4] point out that providing support to the public and the public sector is the real potential source of social media. Therefore, social media can be seen as a communication tool to promote public engagement through effective feedback, coordination, and discussion.
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a new infectious disease transmitted mainly through respiratory droplets and contact, which poses a great threat and challenge to public health. China’s first case of COVID-19 occurred in Wuhan, Hubei province. The Novel Coronavirus outbreak was listed as a public health emergency of international concern by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 30 January 2020 [5]. In the process, information and discussions about COVID-19 spread rapidly across the Internet, especially on SM.
At present, social media has become an important channel to promote risk communication during the epidemic crisis [6,7]. Increasing numbers of public health departments and individuals tend to use social media platforms to communicate and share information. In the previous literature, many studies have applied social media data to infectious disease studies in the context of public health as a measure of public engagement. For example, H7N9 [8,9,10], Ebola virus [6,11,12,13,14], Zika virus [7,15,16], etc.
As a main social media platform in China, Sina Weibo has become increasingly important for the public to spread epidemic diseases since the outbreak of the Novel Coronavirus. It is an interesting and urgent issue to study the extent to which the public is concerned about the COVID-19 epidemic on Weibo, to promote communication between the government and the public through risk communication and community participation, and to eliminate public confusion and misunderstanding.
However, there are a limited number of studies on Weibo in the public sector or at local government, most of them focus on the analysis of SM (mainly Twitter) for electoral campaigns [17,18,19,20,21]. Therefore, we want to analyze citizen engagement on the social media platform, not only for political purposes but also for social mobilization. The open-source of platform and computing techniques make it possible to research this phenomenon of engagement, to evaluate public opinion. Several scholars have pointed out the importance of focusing on what local entities do on SM to assess the real impact on government-to-citizen (G2C) relationships [2,22].
The main purpose of our study was to analyze how the Wuhan local government use Weibo to interact with their citizens during the COVID-19 epidemic. As the only official Weibo account of the Wuhan government, Wuhan Release has 3.78 million followers (as of September 2020), and has a large number of posts every day. We focused on Weibo because it is one of the most popular SM platforms in China, which is the equivalent of Twitter. As of the fourth quarter of 2018, the number of monthly active users had reached 462 million, and approximately 200 million people are using Sina Weibo every day [23]. It offers opportunities for organizations to contact different types of individuals and broadcast information [24]. In the past, Weibo experienced a steady growth, while recently the number of active users is rather stable, and not the microblogging site has created a great community and shows strong loyalty [25].
This study attempts to indicate which factors in Wuhan Release’s posts influenced citizen engagement on Weibo, and consider the following: content type, text length, information source, media richness, the dialogic loop of the text. In the following research, we tried to answer these two questions:
RQ1:    How different information factors of Weibo posts (content type, text length, information source and media richness) from Wuhan local government information release influence citizen engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic?
RQ2:    To what extent does the dialogic loop of the Wuhan local government information release influence citizen engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic?
To our best knowledge, this is the first study on COVID-19 to provide a general overview of Weibo usage by Wuhan local governments, offering insights into the correlations related to indicates such as the published posts, contents type, and the citizens’ engagement. Due to the lack of empirical studies, this study would help local governments to integrate academic research into the local communication strategy, we believe that our paper might have implications for both research and practice as it provides an overview of how the Wuhan local governments use Weibo, and what factors influence citizens’ responsiveness.
To boost engagement, understanding what content types attractive is important [1]. Some particular content types might be more engaging than others [26]. Hence, identifying those types together will be useful in maintaining a fluid conversation with citizens during a crisis [27]. Once the strategy and factors are identified, guidelines should be established, which would be beneficial to both sides, government, and citizens.
This study combines both quantitative and qualitative data. This mixed-method has been proven to be effective in previous studies [28]. The quantitative component focuses on the statistical analysis of metrics related to follower behavior (reposts, replies, likes) to understand the level of engagement. The qualitative analysis is drawled on grounded theory, coded the text to identify the content of posts and concluded into various topic categories [29]. By identifying the factors related to Weibo citizen participation, we analyzed whether different content and media characteristics influence the level of engagement, as well as the significant relationship.
This paper is divided into five parts. The second part is a review of previous research. The third part describes the methods of our research. The fourth part presents the results of the research on citizen engagement in the government of Wuhan. The last part justifies the main findings of this paper, discusses the limitations of the study, and looks forward to the future research direction.