The relationship between a health communication podcast and audience engagement: A social media case study

Knowledge about how health communication relates to the needs of the audience may foster two-way communication and audience engagement. Utilizing text mining and cumulative term frequencies (CTF), we investigated the German podcast Coronavirus Update and its subsequent YouTube comments concerning preventive measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. CTF patterns as a measure of relative relevance revealed that preventive measures were partly discussed more frequently in the podcasts (e.g., testing) or the comments (e.g., wearing a mask) and demonstrated ‘discourse hot spots’. The CTF approach enables researchers to identify episodes for further analyses and could help health communicators to foster two-way communication.