Current status of official WeChat accounts for public health education

Abstract

Background: To investigate the current use status of official WeChat accounts for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in public health education and relevant factors that can impact the effectiveness of message delivery.

Methods: A retrospective survey was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of official WeChat accounts. About 531 official WeChat accounts and 50 939 articles were analyzed using a cluster sampling survey design. The Kruskal-Wallis test and multivariate logistic regression were used to explore factors associated with the usefulness of the number of views and "Likes" of the articles.

Results: The study identified a total of 531 public WeChat accounts, including 19 province-level accounts, 179 municipal-level accounts and 333 county-level accounts. In the univariable analysis, the administrative level of the account, article order, time segment, article originality and thematic category were associated with the number of views and "Likes." Province-level accounts, first articles, the 5:00-6:00 time segment, original articles and theme 3 (emergencies) had higher numbers of views and "Likes" than the others (P < 0.05).

Conclusions: Promoting health education through Official WeChat account is an effective, sustainable and feasible strategy. Potential indicators of the impact of public health education suggest that administrators should effectively use official WeChat accounts for public health education.

Keywords: behavior; public health; social media.