Impact of Government Social Media on the City Image Communication Effect During a Sudden Public Health Crisis: Qualitative Comparative Analysis

The outbreak of public health crises highlights the key role of government social media in crisis communication.However, during a public crisis, the narrative approach of government social media directly affects how a city's image is communicated.For instance are the singularity of urban cases, the listing of explanation attributions, and the generalization of coping strategies.Therefore, this study aimed to bridge the identified research gap by offering insights into the intricate mechanisms of how city image is shaped and disseminated through government social media during health crises.This study used qualitative comparative analysis to construct a multi-factor model to assess the effectiveness of city image dissemination.The research samples, a total of 14 cities, were randomly selected from 31 provincial capital cities in China based on the sum of the total number of provincial capital cities in the eastern (8), central (2), and western (4) regions, as well as the weight ratios of city levels.The results indicated that from the perspective of single conditional factors, urban hierarchy (UH) and reporting strength (RS) had the greatest impact on the communication effect (CE), while the impact of the reporting theme (RT) is not significant enough.The results indicated that a combination of configurations with a strong focusing RT and high RS could achieve good CE, and UH, as a marginal factor, maintained a certain impact on CE.In view of the impact of COVID-19, the following construction logic and communication path for communicating China's city image are proposed: First, the hierarchical structure of the city has been broken and a new spatial pattern for the city image has been constructed; second, constructing cultural symbols of the metropolitan area and forming a new cultural identity; third, communication strategies should be adjusted and RTs gathered.