Motivation and Engagement Initiatives of the Philippine Government’s Message During a Health Crisis

Abstract

This master’s thesis reviews and analyses the different motivations and engagement initiatives of the government through the Department of Health official Facebook page. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, different countries had their own protocols to follow as advised by the World Health Communication. The Philippines was not spared from this. On March 16, 2020, the president placed the nation into a “public health emergency”. With CrowdTangle, a social media monitoring application, this study was able to gather Facebook posts from March 1 to 31, 2020. Each post was reviewed and had corresponding keywords and codes and were plotted on the Motivation Continuum to identify the reasons of behavior. 64.3% posts were found to be usefulness-driven and only 0.9% posts were interest-driven. It was apparent that posts which are useful had more engagement than the ones motivated by external and internal threats. Moreso, the engagement type that resonated more was sharing versus the others (like and care). With the review and analysis, this study offers a valuable information on how to find the message motivation and what kinds of messaging resonates to the online engagement of the public.