Scenario-Based Messages on Social Media Motivate COVID-19 Information Seeking.

ABSTRACT: Communicating information about health risks empowers individuals to make informed decisions. To identify effective communication strategies, we manipulated the specificity, self-relevance, and emotional framing of messages designed to motivate information seeking about COVID-19 exposure risk. In Study 1 (N=221,829), we conducted a large-scale social media field study. Using Facebook advertisements, we targeted users by age and political attitudes. Episodic specificity drove engagement: Advertisements that contextualized risk in specific scenarios produced the highest click-through rates, across all demographic groups. In Study 2, we replicated and extended our findings in an online experiment (N=4,233). Message specificity (but not self-relevance or emotional valence) drove interest in le

SUBMITTER: Sinclair AH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11034827 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature