Factors Influencing Public Participation In Short Videos About Government Affairs

With the rapid development of mobile communication technology,the form of social media keeps its pace of innovation.Governments at all levels actively follow the trend of the technology-oriented times to promote the construction of e-government through social media,such as official government website,government Weibo,government We Chat official accounts,and APPs of government affairs.In 2018,short videos,as a new form of social media,are promising.Governments at all levels started to create their official accounts for promoting government affairs via short videos.At present,Douyin,a rising star of short video industry,has become a new online community for policy promotion and government-people interaction.People’s engagement is reflected on likes,comments and shares,all of which help develop and hype those short videos on government affairs.This paper analyzes the factors influencing public participation in short videos about government affairs,hoping to guide the making of high-quality short videos,to improve the influence of government information,to narrow the gap between government and people,and to enhance people’s trust and satisfaction on government.Based on information ecology theory and combined with the existing information ecology system,this paper,from production,organization,promotion,consumption and operation of video content,sets 10 influencing factors,including categories,forms,music,headline style,figures,“#” hashtags,hashtags for #collections,“@” signs,comments,pertinence between video content and accounts.In addition,600 short videos about government affairs are selected as research samples from government Douyin accounts,all of which rank first in the 2020 comprehensive client-government index of12 areas including politics and law,police,court,procuratorate,judiciary,the Communist Youth League,emergency management,Ministry of culture and tourism,National Health Commission,Women’s Federation,Meteorological Administration and convergence media.This paper analyzes and verifies how factors above influence on likes,comments and shares of people’s engagement in short videos about government affairs through linear regression analysis.The empirical analysis shows: as for categories,army and police promotion,positive figure promotion,and government affair information on hot topics can simultaneously promote three behaviors of people’s engagement while life service information can stimulate people’s comment behavior;as for forms,reprocessed videos can simultaneously promote three behaviors of people’s engagement;as for music,touching music can simultaneously promote the three behaviors of people’s engagement while passionate music can stimulate people’s like behavior and comment behavior;as for figures,there are more likes,comments and shares on videos that contain army,police or grass roots.Moreover,using “@” signs can three behaviors of people’s engagement.Both adding hashtags for #collections and replying comments can also gain likes and comments from people.According to the analysis result,this paper puts forward some suggestions on policy to improve people’s engagement in short videos about government affairs: have a clear positioning for roles and post more high-quality short videos;strengthen the talent construction to innovate measures for organization and planning;coordinate multidimensional platforms to give play to aggregating effect;improve interactive experience to enhance the stickiness of people’s engagement;have a clear positioning of video functions and establish a sound system of laws and regulations.