Lessons learned from Covid-19: Analysis of Malaysia’s health pandemic engagement through Malaysiakini Facebook posts
Keywords:
COVID-19, Facebook, Social media engagement, Media richness, Quantitative content analysisAbstract
During public health crises, social media becomes crucial for public health communication due to its speed and accessibility. This study uses the COVID-19 pandemic, a global health crisis, as a case study to investigate Facebook news engagement in Malaysia. By conducting quantitative content analysis, this study examines the effect of local news organization, Malaysiakini’s Facebook posts on social media news engagement. Data were collected from June and August 2021 and yield a total of 1959 COVID-19 related posts, coded and processed into SPSS 26 for analysis. Bivariate correlation analysis was run to check the proposed research question and hypotheses on the relationships between post characteristics (content type, post time, post word, image, video, hashtag, hyperlinks,) and social media engagement (number of reactions, comments and shares). According to the findings, combating rumors is the most popular news topic among users. Correlational studies, on the other hand, demonstrate that content type has no significant relationship with likes and shares behavior, but only a minor relationship with comments. Furthermore, this study discovered that engagement techniques (post time, post word) may have a negative or no impact on social media engagement. In terms of media richness, image posting correlates positively with all social media engagement indicators, whereas video posting has the opposite effect, negatively impacting engagement intention. These findings have contributed to fresh perspectives on Media Rich Theory and it has the theoretical and practical consequences for governments, health organizations, the news practitioner, and researchers in terms of epidemic communication and public engagement.
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