Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Oct 13;17(10):e0275534.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0275534. eCollection 2022.

Promoting engagement with quality communication in social media

Matteo Cinelli  1   2 , Antonio Peruzzi  1 , Ana Lucía Schmidt  1 , Roberta Villa  1 , Enrico Costa  1 , Walter Quattrociocchi  2 , Fabiana Zollo  1
Affiliations

Promoting engagement with quality communication in social media

Matteo Cinelli et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic made explicit the issues of communicating science in an information ecosystem dominated by social media platforms. One of the fundamental communication challenges of our time is to provide the public with reliable content and contrast misinformation. This paper investigates how social media can become an effective channel to promote engagement and (re)build trust. To measure the social response to quality communication, we conducted an experimental study to test a set of science communication recommendations on Facebook and Twitter. The experiment involved communication practitioners and social media managers from select countries in Europe, applying and testing such recommendations for five months. Here we analyse their feedback in terms of adoption and show that some differences emerge across platforms, topics, and recommendation categories. To evaluate these recommendations' effect on users, we measure their response to quality content, finding that the median engagement is generally higher, especially on Twitter. The results indicate that quality communication strategies may elicit positive feedback on social media. A data-driven and co-designed approach in developing counter-strategies is thus promising in tackling misinformation.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Adoption rates on social media platforms.
Adoption rate of the recommendations for the considered topics, for Twitter (top) and Facebook (bottom). For Facebook, the topic Vaccines is missing due to the limited number of posts.
Fig 2
Fig 2. Co-occurrence of recommendation on social media platforms.
Co-occurrence matrices displaying the proportion of recommendations applied together within the same posts for Twitter (top) and Facebook (bottom). Since the co-occurrence is a reciprocal quantity, the matrix is symmetric around the diagonal, thus only the upper triangular part is reported. As shown in the legend, darker colours indicate a higher co-occurrence of recommendations. In the case of Facebook, the topic Vaccines is missing due to the limited number of posts.
Fig 3
Fig 3. Distribution of reactions on Twitter.
Kernel density estimates of Favourites (left) and Retweets (right) for each topic.
Fig 4
Fig 4. Distribution of reactions on Facebook.
Kernel density estimates of Likes (top), Comments (centre) and Shares (bottom) for each of the four topics on Facebook. The topic Vaccines is missing due to the limited number of posts.
Fig 5
Fig 5. Point estimates and 95% confidence interval of negative-binomial regressions coefficients (Twitter).
Left Panel: Coefficient estimates obtained by regressing favourites (in blue) and retweets (in red) on the number of recommendations adopted for each leading principle. Right panel: Coefficient estimates obtained by regressing favourites and retweets on each recommendation.
Fig 6
Fig 6. Point estimates and 95% confidence interval of negative-binomial regressions coefficients (Facebook).
Left Panel: Coefficient estimates obtained by regressing likes (in blue) and shares (in green) on the number of recommendations adopted for each leading principle. Right panel: Coefficient estimates obtained by regressing likes and shares on each recommendation.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Saitz R, Schwitzer G. Communicating science in the time of a pandemic. Jama. 2020;. doi: 10.1001/jama.2020.12535 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Brossard D. New media landscapes and the science information consumer. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2013;110(Supplement 3):14096–14101. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1212744110 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Dietz T. Bringing values and deliberation to science communication. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2013;110(Supplement 3):14081–14087. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1212740110 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Druckman JN, McGrath MC. The evidence for motivated reasoning in climate change preference formation. Nature Climate Change. 2019;9(2):111–119. doi: 10.1038/s41558-018-0360-1 - DOI
    1. Del Vicario M, Bessi A, Zollo F, Petroni F, Scala A, Caldarelli G, et al.. The spreading of misinformation online. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 2016;113(3):554–559. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1517441113 - DOI - PMC - PubMed

Publication types