5.2. Practical Implications
This study brings some evidence of the factors influencing citizen engagement on Weibo. Firstly, government departments should comprehensively take the crisis lifecycle into account when conducting crisis response, which including a clear understanding of the crisis situation and a full analysis of the public’s information demand on different stages of a crisis. Secondly, government agencies should selectively employ media richness theory and actively use the dialogic loop to enhance public engagement. Government accounts can take full advantage of social media functions, especially mentions @ and hashtags, the number of original posts, add pictures and text length appropriately, to increase interactions with the public, to improve the level of engagement. Therefore, the results can be used to optimize the government information release model during the COVID-19 crisis to explain the influence of antecedence on social media users. We also provide a new method to capture and analyze all Weibo data officially released by Wuhan local government during the crisis.
Additionally, our findings may have practical implications for community managers in the public sector who are responsible for online communication during crisis outbreaks. Thus, our research can help local governments improve their online communication strategies, revealing factors that lead to higher citizen responsiveness. It is also possible to improve the quality of the information release services provided by maintaining a smooth dialogue with citizens by meeting their needs.