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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.

As the social media platform becomes an ever more important communication channel between company and customer, companies are learning how they can best utilize social media to better communicate their brands with customers. The purpose of this paper is to explore the communication tactics adopted by the enterprise microblogs using a communication framework. Further, the authors hope to find out how these communication tactics influence customer brand experience (BE) and subsequently brand loyalty.

First, to identify the communication tactics used by enterprise microblogs, the authors recruited six active microblog users and listed all possible characteristics of enterprise microblogs that could increase customers’ fondness for the brand. Second, based on the listed 19 characteristics and existing theories, the authors pre-classified and conceptualized the content and style tactics categories. The authors also followed a sorting procedure to verify our classification. Finally, based on the sorted characteristics and previous research, the authors designed a questionnaire and 459 sets of valid data were collected from enterprise microblog users.

The communication tactics are classified into two dimensions, namely content tactics and style tactics. The content tactics include content diversity, content accuracy and content timeliness, and the style tactics include impression enhancement style and interactivity enhancement style. The results reveal that the communication content and style tactics significantly enhance overall customer BE and further brand loyalty. The study results also show that style tactics exert more influence on BE than content tactics.

This paper highlights the company’s important role in company-customer communication on social media, and categorizes the effective communication tactics used by the enterprise microblog within a communication framework. Companies could build brand loyalty by enhancing users’ BE using effective communication. The communication perspective and measures of the communication tactics in this study provide an ideal background for future research on IT-based company-customer interaction.

This paper aims to explore how enterprise microblogging can influence consumer loyalty and thus generate business value for firms. The study aims to expand traditional brand community theory.

The paper is based on brand community theory, social identity theory and usage and gratifications theory. Using a pre-survey of the fans of an enterprise microblog and a random sample survey of such fans on Sina Weibo, the authors tested the structural equation model with LISREL, which includes multiple fit indices.

The paper provides empirical insights about how enterprise microblogging can influence consumer loyalty and thus generate business value for firms. It suggests that consumers’ perceived value could strengthen their microblog identification, which will influence their perceived relationship with the enterprise and its products directly and indirectly through the mediation of enterprise identification. Perceived relationship can further influence purchase and recommendation intentions.

Because of the chosen data collecting approach, the research results may be still subjective. Moreover, the study overlooks the effects of the different types of enterprise microblogging and consumers.

Enterprises should operate their official microblogging from the perspective of maintaining brand community to improve consumer loyalty. They can generate more value for consumers through their microblogging and predict the operating performance by evaluating the degree of consumers’ relationship perception.

This paper considers enterprise microblogging as a new form of virtual brand community and identifies its features, and expands theories of brand community, and social media/IT business value, social identity theory and gratifications theory.

With the prevailing microblogging phenomenon, many marketers have created their microblog accounts to promote products, advertise brands, and attract consumers. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of consumers’ community commitment, information technology (IT) habit, and participation on their brand loyalty in the context of enterprise microblogs.

A total of 364 valid data were collected from fans or followers of enterprise microblogs through a survey on Weibo.com. The data were analyzed with smart partial least squares.

Community commitment and IT habit directly lead to brand loyalty and indirectly affect brand loyalty through the mediating influence of participation. Information quality, perceived expertise, and social interaction are antecedents of community commitment. Satisfaction, importance, and social interaction positively affect IT habit.

To enhance the generalizability of the study, future studies may examine findings in other platforms (e.g. Twitter) with a large sample size.

Practitioners can increase consumers’ brand loyalty through enterprise microblogs. Considerable attention should be directed to facilitating members’ community commitment and IT habit. In addition, the study points out significant antecedents of community commitment and IT habit for researchers, managers, and companies.

To uncover the marketing potential of microblogging technology, the authors highlight the need for investigating how enterprise microblogs generate promising marketing outcomes. The present study examines key determinants of brand loyalty. The model empirically shows the significant effects of community commitment, IT habit, and participation.

Brand microblogs have been adopted as a new approach to promote products or services and maintain relationships with consumers for companies, but literature on why consumers are willing to participate on these microblogs is still relatively limited. The purpose of this study is to examine factors affecting consumers’ participation on brand microblogs and then indicate the underlying mechanism of this process based on elaboration likelihood model (ELM), commitment–trust theory and social presence.

An online survey was conducted in China to investigate consumers who followed brand microblogs. A total of 380 valid responses were collected, and the data were analyzed by the partial least squares structural equation modeling to assess the proposed research model.

The findings show that argument quality and source credibility of a brand microblog are two important factors that enhance consumers’ community commitment and trust toward the microblog, which, in turn, promote their participation intention. In addition, social presence has a moderating effect on the relationship between trust toward brand microblog and participation.

This study extends the understanding regarding consumers’ information adoption processes in brand microblogs from both central and peripheral routes based on ELM. Besides, the role of trust in affecting consumers’ participation and community commitment in the context of brand microblog has been examined from a more detailed perspective. Finally, this paper better reveal the role of social presence in brand communities by focusing on its moderating effect on the relationship between commitment–trust and consumers’ participation. These findings can provide entrepreneurs with insights into strengthening consumers’ participation and operating their brand microblogs in the long-term.

The purpose of this paper is to identify salient topic categories and outline their evolution patterns and temporal trends in microblogs on a public health emergency across different stages. Comparisons were also examined to reveal the similarities and differences between those patterns and trends on microblog platforms of different languages and from different nations.

A total of 459,266 microblog entries about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 on Twitter and Weibo were collected for nine months after the inception of the outbreak. Topics were detected by the latent Dirichlet allocation model and classified into several categories. The daily tweets were analyzed with the self-organizing map technique and labeled with the most salient topics. The investigated time span was divided into three stages, and the most salient topic categories were identified for each stage.

In total, 14 salient topic categories were identified in microblogs about the Ebola outbreak and were summarized as increasing, decreasing, fluctuating or ephemeral types. The topical evolution patterns of microblogs and temporal trends for topic categories vary on different microblog platforms. Twitter users were keen on the dynamics of the Ebola outbreak, such as status description, secondary events and so forth, while Weibo users focused on background knowledge of Ebola and precautions.

This study revealed evolution patterns and temporal trends of microblog topics on a public health emergency. The findings can help administrators of public health emergencies and microblog communities work together to better satisfy information needs and physical demands by the public when public health emergencies are in progress.

This paper aims to better understand the cultural‐philosophical significance of microblogging. In this way it seeks to inform evaluations of this new medium and of the culture and society it co‐shapes and in which it is rooted.

Engaging in philosophical reflection inspired by philosophy of technology, political philosophy, and cultural history, this paper identifies and discusses some structural features of microblogging such as Twitter.

This paper discusses the following structural features of microblogging as a medium: an emphasis on activity, the rule of opinion, emphasis on the ordinary and on the self, blurring of the private/public distinction, the primacy of the present, and the paradox of distance and proximity. The discussion also suggests that microblogging remediates “older” media such as letters, e‐mails, texting, diaries, and newspaper writings. Finally, the paper explores some strategies to cope with the new medium, including “hacking” it in order to widen the spectrum of possibilities it offers.

The paper assists users and policy makers to reflect on how new media such as microblogging might change the way we live and think. It helps them to better understand the medium and to evaluate its use.

Although there are data available now on the use of Twitter and other microblogging technologies, there has been very little philosophical reflection on the phenomenon. This paper begins to bridge this gap and makes novel connections between ideas from different academic fields.

To present YouFlow Microblog and how its functionalities for discourse structuring and message classification allows improving learning. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors developed a survey on microblogs and its functionalities for supporting education, and then the authors developed a new microblog called YouFlow Microblog, which was used in a case study to illustrate its applicability.

The results were: the categorization of messages according to the lesson plan allowed deeper discussions; the amount of messages and preference of the students for the categorization approach are directly related; the filtering of messages (categorization on the reading time) was used as a facilitator of the discussion understanding; the students prefer the search results organized by the categories and related messages; and the students were able to follow the discussions supported by the tree structure of discourse, categorization of messages according to the lesson plan and searches or filtering of messages.

Other case studies involving more students and from different knowledge areas could be performed. Other approaches for messages' visualization for reducing the amount of information could be explored, such as recommendation of messages in microblogs; and groupings of messages according to date, priority and subject.

The developed microblog is useful and proved to be interesting for applying in the educational context.

No other microblog allows different structuring of messages and the their classification according to the lesson plan, in addition to filtering and query functionalities.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual model to investigate the determinants of information retweeting in microblogging based on Heuristic‐Systematic Model.

Microblogging data about emergency events from Sina microblogging (http://weibo.com) are collected and analyzed with text mining technology. The proposed hypotheses are tested with logistic and multiple linear regressions.

The results show that source trustworthiness, source expertise, source attractiveness, and the number of multimedia have significant effects on the information retweeting. In addition, source expertise moderates the effects of user trustworthiness and content objectivity on the information retweeting in microblogging.

This study provides an in‐depth understanding of what makes information about emergency events in microblogging diffuse so rapidly. Based on these findings the emergency management organizations in China can apply the microblogging to spread useful information, and these findings also provide practical implications for microblogging system designers.

The primary value of this paper lies in providing a better understanding of information retweeting in microblogging based on Heuristic‐Systematic Model. Organizations that would like to adopt the microblogging platform in emergency situations to improve the ability of emergency response can benefit from the findings of this study.

Sina Microblog is the most popular microblog in China. The purpose of this research is to explore the factors that influence Sina microbloggers' intention to continue using this platform.

This research proposes the effects of user satisfaction based on perceived usefulness, experiential value and knowledge sharing motivation and community norm on continual usage intention.

The results suggest that continual usage intention is directly affected by perceived usefulness, experiential value, egoism, satisfaction and community norm. Theoretical and practical implications are considered.

This paper is one of the earliest empirical studies in China to explore why Chinese consumers intend to rather than actually use Sina Microblog.