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Microblogs are communication platforms for companies and consumers that challenge companies' brand marketing strategies. This paper provides a theoretical basis for expanding microblog applications and a practical basis for improving the effectiveness of brand marketing.

The authors use factor analysis to extract the factors of microblog user influence and construct a structural equation model to reveal the interaction mechanism of the influencing factors. Additionally, the authors clarify the promotion and enhancement effects of these factors.

Microblog user influence can be converted into richness, interaction and value factors. The richness factor significantly affects the latter two, whereas the interaction factor does not affect the value factor.

First, the sample used is limited to media industry practitioners. To increase generalizability, diverse groups should be included in future studies. Second, this model's theoretical explanatory ability can be further developed by adding other meaningful factors beyond the existing ones.

This study analyzes the factors of microblog user influence in China and validates the relevant elements. As a result, it improves the influence research on social media users and benefits the practice of information recommendation and microblog marketing.

This study aims to investigate the mechanism of the misinformation spread based on the elaboration likelihood model and the effects of four factors – emotion, topic, authority and richness – on the depth, breadth and structural virality of misinformation spread.

The authors collected 2,514 misinformation microblogs and 142,006 reposts from Weibo, used deep learning methods to identify the emotions and topics of misinformation and extracted the structural characteristics of the spreading network using the network analysis method.

Results show that misinformation has a smaller spread size and breadth than true news but has a similar spread depth and structural virality. The differential influence of emotions on the structural characteristics of misinformation propagation was found: sadness can promote the breadth of misinformation spread, anger can promote depth and disgust can promote depth and structural virality. In addition, the international topic, the number of followers, images and videos can significantly and positively influence the misinformation's spread size, depth, breadth and structural virality.

The influencing factors of the structural characteristics of misinformation propagation are clarified, which is helpful for the detection and management of misinformation.

This study aims to explore the dissemination and evolutionary path of online public opinion from a crisis management perspective. By clarifying the influencing factors and dynamic mechanisms of online public opinion dissemination, this study provides insights into attenuating the negative impact of online public opinion and creating a favorable ecological space for online public opinion.

This research employs bibliometric analysis and CiteSpace software to analyze 302 Chinese articles published from 2006 to 2023 in the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database and 276 English articles published from 1994 to 2023 in the Web of Science core set database. Through literature keyword clustering, co-citation analysis and burst terms analysis, this paper summarizes the core scientific research institutions, scholars, hot topics and evolutionary paths of online public opinion crisis management research from both Chinese and international academic communities.

The results show that the study of online public opinion crisis management in China and internationally is centered on the life cycle theory, which integrates knowledge from information, computer and system sciences. Although there are differences in political interaction and stage evolution, the overall evolutionary path is similar, and it develops dynamically in the “benign conflict” between the expansion of the research perspective and the gradual refinement of research granularity.

This study summarizes the research results of online public opinion crisis management from China and the international academic community and identifies current research hotspots and theoretical evolution paths. Future research can focus on deepening the basic theories of public opinion crisis management under the influence of frontier technologies, exploring the subjectivity and emotionality of web users using fine algorithms and promoting the international development of network public opinion crisis management theory through transnational comparison and international cooperation.

We investigate the joint impacts of three trust cues – content, sentiment and helpfulness votes – of online product reviews on the trust of reviews and attitude toward the product/service reviewed.

We performed three studies to test our research model, presenting participants with scenarios involving product reviews and prior users' helpful and unhelpful votes across experimental settings.

A high helpfulness ratio boosts users’ trust and influences behaviors in both positive and negative reviews. This effect is more pronounced in attribute-based reviews than emotion-based ones. Unlike the ratio effect, helpfulness magnitude significantly impacts only negative attribute-based reviews.

Future research should investigate voting systems in various online contexts, such as Facebook post likes, Twitter microblog thumb-ups and up-votes for article comments on platforms like The New York Times.

Our findings have significant implications for voting system-providers implementing information techniques on third-party review platforms, participatory sites emphasizing user-generated content and online retailers prioritizing product awareness and reputation.

This study addresses an identified need; that is, the helpfulness votes as an additional trust cue and the joint effects of three trust cues – content, sentiment and helpfulness votes – of online product reviews on the trust of customers in reviews and their consequential attitude toward the product/service reviewed.

Triggered by the extensive use of social media brand communities (SMBCs) in interactive marketing, this article aims to explore how brand connectedness (BC) affects consumer engagement behavior (CEB) in SMBCs.

The research model was verified with the partial least squares structural equation modeling applied to the actual data collected from the web crawling largest microblogging platform in China (Sina Weibo).

Results indicate that BC may positively influence consumer emotions (CEs), eventually leading to engagement behavior in SMBCs. In addition, gender and duration of membership act as vital moderators in the model. One of the most interesting findings is the differences between posting and commenting, although both are CEBs. BC has a more significant effect on commenting than posting, and the mediating effect of CEs between BC and posting behavior is not significant.

This research contributes to the literature on interactive marketing by examining BC in the context of SMBCs, which is under-researched in the literature but is highly pertinent to social media contexts. Moreover, we measure BC through social network analysis for the first time, which not only supports the empirical work but also expands the social network theory and social capital theory. This research also extends the body of knowledge on consumer engagement by investigating the differences between posting and commenting behaviors.

This study employs bibliometric analysis to map the research landscape of social media trending topics during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors aim to offer a comprehensive review of the predominant research organisations and countries, key themes and favoured research methodologies pertinent to this subject.

The authors extracted data on social media trending topics from the Web of Science Core Collection database, spanning from 2009 to 2022. A total of 1,504 publications were subjected to bibliometric analysis, utilising the VOSviewer tool. The study analytical process encompassed co-occurrence, co-authorship, citation analysis, field mapping, bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis.

Interest in social media research, particularly on trending topics during the COVID-19 pandemic, remains high despite signs of the pandemic stabilising globally. The study predominantly addresses misinformation and public health communication, with notable focus on interactions between governments and the public. Recent studies have concentrated on analysing Twitter user data through text mining, sentiment analysis and topic modelling. The authors also identify key leading organisations, countries and journals that are central to this research area.

Diverging from the narrow focus of previous literature reviews on social media, which are often confined to particular fields or sectors, this study offers a broad view of social media's role, emphasising trending topics. The authors demonstrate a significant link between social media trends and public events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper discusses research priorities that emerged during the pandemic and outlines potential methodologies for future studies, advocating for a greater emphasis on qualitative approaches.

The peer-review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-05-2023-0194.

This study aims to analyze government hotline text data and generating forecasts could enable the effective detection of public demands and help government departments explore, mitigate and resolve social problems.

In this study, social problems were determined and analyzed by using the time attributes of government hotline data. Social public events with periodicity were quantitatively analyzed via the Prophet model. The Prophet model is decided after running a comparison study with other widely applied time series models. The validation of modeling and forecast was conducted for social events such as travel and educational services, human resources and public health.

The results show that the Prophet algorithm could generate relatively the best performance. Besides, the four types of social events showed obvious trends with periodicities and holidays and have strong interpretable results.

The research could help government departments pay attention to time dependency and periodicity features of the hotline data and be aware of early warnings of social events following periodicity and holidays, enabling them to rationally allocate resources to handle upcoming social events and problems and better promoting the role of the big data structure of government hotline data sets in urban governance innovations.

Retail investors are prone to be affected by information dissemination in social media with the rapid development of Web 2.0. The purpose of this study is to recognize the factors that may impact users' retweet behavior, namely information dissemination in the online financial community, through machine learning techniques.

This paper crawled data from the Chinese online financial community (Xueqiu.com) and extracted author-related, content-related, situation-related, stock-related and stock market-related features from the dataset. The best information dissemination prediction model based on these features was determined by evaluating five classifiers with various performance metrics, and the predictability of different feature groups was tested.

Five prevalent classifiers were evaluated with various performance metrics and the random forest classifier was proven to be the best retweet prediction model in the authors’ experiments. Moreover, the predictability of author-related, content-related and market-related features was illustrated to be relatively better than that of the other two feature groups. Several particularly important features, such as the author's followers and the rise and fall of the stock index, were recognized in this paper at last.

This study contributes to in-depth research on information dissemination in the financial domain. The findings of this study have important practical implications for government regulators to supervise public opinion in the financial market.

This paper investigates the usage and trust of Chinese social media in the travel planning process (pre-trip, during-trip and post-trip) of Chinese tourists.

Through a combination of structured online survey (n = 406) and follow-up interviews, the research identifies the diversification of the demand-and-supply patterns of social media users in China, as well as the allocation of functions of social media as tools before, during and after travel.

Social media users are diverse in terms of their adoption of social media, use behaviour and scope; the levels of trust and influence; and their ultimate travel decisions and actions. Correlations between the level of trust, influence of social media and the intended changes in travel decisions are observed. Destination marketers and tourism industries should observe and adapt to the needs of social media users and potential tourist markets by understanding more about user segmentation between platforms or apps and conducting marketing campaigns on social media platforms to attract a higher number of visitors.

This paper demonstrated the case of social media usage in mainland China, which has been regarded as one of the fastest growing and influential tourist-generating markets and social media expansions in the world. This study further addressed the knowledge gap by correlating social media usage and travel planning process of Chinese tourists. The research findings suggested diversification of the demand-and-supply pattern of social media users in China, as well as the use of social media as tools before, during and after travel. Users were diversified in terms of their adoption of social media, use behaviour, scope, the levels of trust, influence and the ultimate travel decisions.

Destination marketing organizations should note that some overseas social media platforms that are not accessible in China like TripAdvisor, Yelp, Facebook and Instagram are still valued by some Chinese tourists, especially during-trip period in journeys to Western countries. Some tactics for specific user segments should be carefully observed. When promoting specific tourism products to Chinese tourists, it is necessary to understand the user segmentation between platforms or apps.

Social media is a powerful tool for tourism development and sustainability in creating smart tourists and destinations worldwide. In China, the use of social media has stimulated the development of both information and communication technology and tourism.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has become a major public health emergency worldwide. How to effectively guide public opinion and implement precise prevention and control is a hot topic in current research. Mining the spatiotemporal coupling between online public opinion and offline epidemics can provide decision support for the precise management and control of future emergencies.

This study focuses on analyzing the spatiotemporal coupling relationship between public opinion and the epidemic. First, based on Weibo information and confirmed case information, a field framework is constructed using field theory. Second, SnowNLP is used for sentiment mining and LDA is utilized for topic extraction to analyze the topic evolution and the sentiment evolution of public opinion in each coupling stage. Finally, the spatial model is used to explore the coupling relationship between public opinion and the epidemic in space.

The findings show that there is a certain coupling between online public opinion sentiment and offline epidemics, with a significant coupling relationship in the time dimension, while there is no remarkable coupling relationship in space. In addition, the core topics of public concern are different at different coupling stages.

This study deeply explores the spatiotemporal coupling relationship between online public opinion and offline epidemics, adding a new research perspective to related research. The result can help the government and relevant departments understand the dynamic development of epidemic events and achieve precise control while mastering the dynamics of online public opinion.