How Health Communication via Tik Tok Makes a Difference: A Content Analysis of Tik Tok Accounts Run by Chinese Provincial Health Committees

Since the inception of social media in the late 90s, it has had a unprecedent influence on healthcare personal and people in general, changing the way we communicate, stay connected , and share information.

Tik-Tok is a micro-video sharing platform that allows users to create short videos, lasting from several seconds to several minutes, and then share it with the wider Tik Tok community, which in 2019 has 500 million of active users with more than 1 billion of downloads. The application provides a non-complicated user interface, and simple-to-use editing and music-inclusion functions.

Social media has been widely adopted by patients, care-givers, and healthcare professionals, with multiple studies reporting its usefulness in patient empowerment, health promotion, patient-physician relationship building, public health surveillance, and quality improvement.

On the other side, other studies have focused on revealing the dark side of social media in healthcare; for example, examining how unverified content leads to the sharing of misleading information, patients becoming overconfident in their own medical decision making, and privacy violation.

This study reveals that Tik Tok users prefer the micro-videos that correlate to their understanding of difficult medical terms. The content type, animated cartoons and documentary were seen to be popular for content relating to demonstration and for creating a sense of being, or stimulate shared emotion, compared to oral presentation and plain text, which were preferred for the sharing of disease knowledge and information on specific drugs. Also, health professionals, including physicians, doctors, and public servants are often easily trusted by the public when sharing health information.

In terms of format, a light style in terms of music background, language, length, and subtitles is preferred by content viewers, but these peripheral factors are not asses video quality. The format could be used to increasing viewing time.

The comments on micro-videos could asses the two-way communication, compared to the total number of likes that could asses one-way communication. Video co-creation can be means for extending communication between creators and recipients. Further interactions require the creators to activate a pro-interaction environment, engage audiences in the content-creation and promotion process, thus realize the multidimensional exchange and interaction. The micro-videos should allow the participation and interactions.

This study had several limitations as it was a descriptive study and not asses the reason of social media adoption or the operators of Tik Tok accounts.(1)

1.            Zhu C, Xu X, Zhang W, Chen J, Evans R. How Health Communication via Tik Tok Makes a Difference: A Content Analysis of Tik Tok Accounts Run by Chinese Provincial Health Committees. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 27 de diciembre de 2019;17(1):192.