The Spread of COVID-19 Crisis Communication by German Public Authorities and Experts on Twitter: Quantitative Content Analysis

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic led to the necessity of immediate crisis communication by public health authorities. In Germany, as in many other countries, people choose social media, including Twitter, to obtain real-time information and understanding of the pandemic and its consequences. Next to authorities, experts such as virologists and science communicators were very prominent at the beginning of German Twitter COVID-19 crisis communication. Objective: The aim of this study was to detect similarities and differences between public authorities and individual experts in COVID-19 crisis communication on Twitter during the first year of the pandemic. Methods: Descriptive analysis and quantitative content analysis were carried out on 8251 original tweets posted from January 1, 2020, to January 15, 2021. COVID-19-related tweets of 21 authorities and 18 experts were categorized into structural, content, and style components. Negative binomial regressions were performed to evaluate tweet spread measured by the retweet and like counts of COVID-19-related tweets. Results: Descriptive statistics revealed that authorities and experts increasingly tweeted about COVID-19 over the period under study. Two experts and one authority were responsible for 70.26% (544,418/774,865) of all retweets, thus representing COVID-19 influencers. Altogether, COVID-19 tweets by experts reached a 7-fold higher rate of retweeting (t(8,249) =26.94, P<.001) and 13.9 times the like rate (t(8,249) =31.27, P<.001) compared with those of authorities. Tweets by authorities were much more designed than those by experts, with more structural and content components; for example, 91.99% (4997/5432) of tweets by authorities used hashtags in contrast to only 19.01% (536/2819) of experts' COVID-19 tweets. Multivariate analysis revealed that such structural elements reduce the spread of the tweets, and the incidence rate of retweets for authorities' tweets using hashtags was approximately 0.64 that of tweets without hashtags (Z=-6.92, P<.001). For experts, the effect of hashtags on retweets was insignificant (Z=1.56, P=.12). Conclusions: Twitter data are a powerful information source and suitable for crisis communication in Germany. COVID-19 tweet activity mirrors the development of COVID-19 cases in Germany. Twitter users retweet and like communications regarding COVID-19 by experts more than those delivered by authorities. Tweets have higher coverage for both authorities and experts when they are plain and for authorities when they directly address people. For authorities, it appears that it was difficult to win recognition during COVID-19. For all stakeholders studied, the association between number of followers and number of retweets was highly significantly positive (authorities Z=28.74, P<.001; experts Z=25.99, P<.001). Updated standards might be required for successful crisis communication by authorities.

Automated summary

The study compared crisis communication on Twitter between public authorities and individual experts in Germany during the COVID-19 pandemic. It found that experts' tweets on COVID-19 received significantly higher rates of retweeting and liking compared to those of authorities, indicating that experts had more influence on the platform. Additionally, the analysis showed that structural elements, such as the use of hashtags, in authorities' tweets could actually reduce the spread of the messages, highlighting the need for updated standards for successful crisis communication.