Institutional use of Twitter to combat the infodemic caused by the Covid-19 health crisis

The international health crisis caused by Covid-19, more serious than those caused by SARS, MERS, influenza A, and Ebola, poses an unprecedented challenge for all institutions around the world in combating the infodemic. The main objective of this work is to analyze institutional behavior through Twitter to determine whether it is possible to deduce an effective institutional online crisis communication model that is applicable in wider contexts. In this sense, a quantitative methodological design is established based on content analysis performed on a simple of 995 tweets from the official Twitter accounts of institutions in charge of managing the health crisis during the first state of alarm in Spain: @sanidadgob (483 tweets), @mitmagob (154 tweets), @defensagob (263 tweets), and @interiorgob (95 tweets). The results illustrate a predominance of empathetic and security-related messages (60.40%); a stable distribution of tweets per day, with 88.74% of them published between 10:00 and 20:59; a moderate use of audiovisual resources (32.26%) with a very informative approach (96.18%); a few significant differences according to the chi-squared statistic with respect to the format (chi(2)((12)) = 606.066; p < 0.001) and approach (chi(2)((3)) = 36.084; p < 0.001) depending on the accounts analyzed; and a substantial level of engagement with the Spanish Ministry of Health's account (68.96%). These results demonstrate that Twitter allows the application of an online institutional communication model that is easily transferable to an international context, suggesting a public relations strategy based on information transparency and constant information flow.