A Comparison of User Engagement with the CDC Facebook Page During Health Crisis and Ordinary Periods

The potential of smartphone apps to improve quality and increase access to mental health care is increasingly clear. Yet even in the current global mental health crisis, real-world uptake of smartphone apps by clinics or consumers remains low. To understand this dichotomy, this paper reviews current challenges surrounding user engagement with mental health smartphone apps. While smartphone engagement metrics and reporting remains heterogeneous in the literature, focusing on themes offers a framework to identify underlying trends. These themes suggest that apps are not designed with service users in mind, do not solve problems users care most about, do not respect privacy, are not seen as trustworthy and are unhelpful in emergencies. Respecting these current issues surrounding mental health app engagement, we propose several solutions and highlight successful examples of mental health apps with high engagement. Further research is necessary to better characterise engagement with mental health apps and identify best practices for design, testing and implementation.

Download Full-text

COVID-19 news reporting and engaging in the age of social media: Comparing Xinhua News Agency and The Paper

Global Media and China ◽

10.1177/20594364211017364 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 205943642110173

Author(s):

Zenan Chen ◽

Xiaoge Xu

Keyword(s):

Social Media ◽

News Media ◽

Special Form ◽

User Engagement ◽

Health Crisis ◽

New Normal ◽

News Reporting ◽

News Stories ◽

News Agency ◽

Xinhua News Agency

“To follow and to be followed” has become the new normal in news communication in the age of social media. News audience follow news via social media while they are being followed by news anytime anywhere. This new normal has created a pressing need to investigate whether social media have brought any changes to both party-controlled and market-oriented news media in China in reporting crises. Comparing Xinhua News Agency (party-controlled) and The Paper (market-oriented), this study investigated how they reported COVID-19 and how their news consumers engaged with their COVID-19 news stories on Jinri Toutiao, a popular and yet special form of social media. This study found that Xinhua News Agency continued to stay overwhelmingly positive, while The Paper was more neutral in reporting the health crisis. Xinhua News Agency was surprisingly more episodic than The Paper in framing the pandemic. The Paper, however, had a higher level of user engagement than Xinhua News Agency. To cater to the changing news-seeking behaviors and patterns, both party-controlled and market-oriented news media have changed their operations, but not their fundamental orientations.

Download Full-text