RAPID: Influencing Young Adults’ Science Engagement and Learning with COVID-19 Media – COVID-19 and Mask Content & Media Format: A Facebook Test

We were interested in learning which images -- videos, graphics or GIFs -- worked best in our Facebook posts to inform our future Facebook content creation strategies.

This collaborative research project between KQED, a public media organization serving the San Francisco Bay Area, Texas Tech University and Rockman et al conducted research to study how best to provide effective COVID-19 science news and social media content for young adult audiences.

The KQED Science Engagement team set out to test different formats of media with the same mask message used in the survey conducted by Texas Tech University. We were interested in learning which images -- videos, graphics or GIFs -- worked best in our Facebook posts to inform our future Facebook content creation strategies.  Our target audience included men and women age 18-65+ in the U.S.

Across all target audiences, the engagement rate for the videos performed best above all other formats followed by GIFs, and then images. As age increased, engagement for all the media formats increased as well.