Evaluating the influence of the Ministry of Health (MOH) social media campaigns on the public’s awareness level regarding COVID-19 information in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Executive Summary Purpose: The aim of this research is to assess the impact of the MOH’s social media campaigns on the public’s awareness levels regarding COVID-19-related information in Saudi Arabia. Methodology: An online survey distributed randomly to people through a social media site (WhatsApp, Snapchat and telegram) from July 21, 2021, to August 3, 2021. Thereafter, Excel and SPSS v.26 were used to prepare and analyse the data. 300 responses were received, but 15 were excluded because the people were not in Saudi Arabia during the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in a sample of 283 respondents. Results: Most respondents were women (54%), and the majority (95%) were from Saudi Arabia. The findings showed that the MOH’s COVID-19 campaigns on social media have a positive impact on the awareness level of people in Saudi Arabia regarding COVID-19- related information, as the largest proportion of participants (86.2%) had a high level of awareness that resulted from the MOH’s COVID-19 campaigns, whereas (13.8%) of participants had a low level of awareness. Twitter was the source that most helped participants to receive information about MOH social media campaigns. In addition, most of the respondents (51%) used social media to search for health information, and 33% always used social media to search for COVID-19-related information. Twitter was the most frequently used social media platform for searching for health information and COVID-19-related information, followed by YouTube. Lastly, the findings revealed reasonably high levels of engagement and satisfaction from the public regarding the MOH’s three COVID-19 campaigns except the We Truly Understand campaign, as only 33% of the research sample had heard or received information about this campaign. These high levels of engagement led to high levels of commitment to the MOH’s instructions. Conclusion: This study found that the MOH’s social media campaigns positively impacted the public’s awareness and behaviour. The results obtained in this study underscore the need for further research to investigate whether the socio-demographic factors of the Saudi public, such as gender and monthly income, have an impact on their awareness levels of COVID-19-related information. In addition, this study recommends that the MOH maintain its full utilisation of social media in future health campaigns, particularly in COVID-19 vaccine promotion.