Search results

The purpose of this paper is to explore the Chinese microblog users’ psychological motivations and the association between users’ motivations and their offline civic and political engagement. Specifically, this study examines what the psychological impetuses of Weibo use are and how they promote the young citizens’ civic and political involvement.

The data were collected through the web-based survey with a total sample of 426 people. Principal components factor analysis, correlation analysis, and hierarchical multiple regressions were sequentially carried out to address the research questions.

The findings reveal that there are four major motives for using Weibo: information, socializing, recognition seeking and entertainment. Interestingly, seeking social needs is positively and significantly related to increasing young people’s civic participation, but not political participation.

Theoretically, the research demonstrates that the uses and gratifications is a suitable approach for analysis of psychological antecedents of Weibo use and subsequent outcomes. Practically, it will help understand the dynamics of how the new media technology may engender democratic development and change.

Although the growing significance of social media has drawn considerable attention, little research has been conducted to assess the political consequences of Weibo. The current study fills the void by investigating whether Weibo functions as an effective tool to facilitate democratic engagement in contemporary China. The obtained results may provide insight into the relationship between the gratification structures and engagement in other social settings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how, in China, postings on social media site Weibo reflect as well as accelerate the reshaping of traditional values. As Chinese social media extend their reach outside China, the displays of visible desire, hedonism and materialism could influence global consumption ethos.

Using interpretive content analysis, over 250 Weibo postings of 8 selected Weibo users, from the network of one of the authors, were identified, coded and interpreted. The users were selected based on their frequency, variety and expressiveness of postings.

Weibo is playing a critical role in transforming Chinese consumer values. Via Weibo, personal consumption experiences are available for public gaze. Consequently, desire for powerfully signified objects and experiences is more visible; “enjoy now” is turning out to be an appreciated life attitude, and materialism and hedonism are growing irresistibly. As a result, the traditional Chinese consumer values – suppressing desire, delaying gratification and thriftiness – are losing ground in Chinese society. Also, as Weibo makes the influence of the elite as well as electronic word-of-mouth very powerful, the values of the elite and grassroots groups are actually converging instead of being separated by substantial chasms that have existed historically.

Sina Weibo had a US initial public offering (IPO) of its stock in April, 2014, and many other China-based Internet firms were getting set for US IPOs. This paper provides unique insights for Chinese social media companies’ potential global impact. Future social media contexts would be shaped by collision as well as convergence of Asia-centric and USA-centric platforms. This paper lays the groundwork for studying such interactions.

In-depth interpretations of Weibo postings contribute to our understanding of how social media impact Chinese society now and would potentially affect global societies later. This is a pioneering study on the massive influences of social media on the macro-level consumer behavior.

With the rapid development of social media in the past few years, some dark aspects of usage have appeared, e.g., Weibo addiction. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to address the question of how Weibo keeps users hooked.

The study utilizes the netnography method to explore the symptoms of Weibo addiction and how it is formed.

First, some Weibo users have typical symptoms of addictive behavior, such as withdrawal, loss of control and general living problems; second, narcissism plays an important role in the process of Weibo addiction and has a stronger effect on content generation than content consumption; third, some users use Weibo as a means to alleviate anxiety, but they can then become more anxious owing to addiction; and fourth, the effect of comments has two sides – on the one hand, comments are one kind of feedback to posts, satisfying posters’ social needs, while on the other hand, a storytelling system consists of one post and its comments, upon which some Weibo users become more dependent.

This research is only a preliminary, exploratory study. Therefore, care should be taken when interpreting these findings.

This study should help social media service providers and users to pay attention to the risk of social media addiction. Social media service providers should take social responsibility, design more user-oriented guidelines for marketing ethics and launch more responsible marketing activities. Users should enhance self-control and better balance social media use and offline real life.

Netnography has not been widely used as an addictive behavior research technique. This study is further bolstered because it has also noticed the difference of addiction mechanisms between addictive micro-bloggers and their followers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore factors influencing social media usage effectiveness of publishing-related entities and discuss the differences between publishing-related individuals and organizations in their usage of social media and the differences between commercial organizations and public service organizations (such as libraries).

This paper studied 546 publishing-related entities’ accounts on the leading Chinese social media and built a theoretical model for the usage of social media by publishing-related entities. Furthermore, it examined the influencing factors from two aspects: power of influence of an entity (entity influence) and the relational interaction of a publishing-related entity with its audience (interactive relationship).

The study found that for publishing-related individual users of social media, entity influence has a greater positive effect on the effectiveness of social media usage than on the effect of interactive relationship. For publishing-related commercial organizations, the entity influence and interactive relationship have equal impacts on the effectiveness of social media usage. It is also found that interactive relationship has a stronger positive effect on the usage effectiveness of social media, especially for publishing-related public service organizations.

This research fills the gap in the research of comparative analysis in the understanding of social media usage by individuals and organizations related to publishing activities. Moreover, it has tried to propose a theoretical model that can help promote the effectiveness of social media usages by various publishing-related entities and their business strategies.

Drawing upon the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and the self-regulation framework, the purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and how factors for social media continuance behaviors work differently between social networking sites and microblogging.

A survey method was used to collect two samples of 557 social networking sites users and 568 microblogging users. The proposed research model was tested with the structural equation modeling technique.

The empirical results demonstrate that the impacts of influencing factors on users’ continuance behaviors vary by types of social media services. Information sharing has a stronger impact on microblog users’ satisfaction than social network users while social interaction has a stronger impact on satisfaction for social network users than microblog users. In addition, interpersonal influence is more effective in shaping satisfaction for the social network users while media influence is more effective in shaping satisfaction for the microblog users.

This is one of the first studies that integrate TPB with Bagozzi’s self-regulation framework to understand the behavioral model of social networking and microblogging continuance. The findings show that the impacts of attitudinal beliefs regarding information sharing and social interaction on social media users’ satisfaction are different across social networking and microblogging contexts. Moreover, this study also reveals different effects of two specific subjective norms – interpersonal and media influence – on continued use of social networking and microblogging.

In this study, specific measures adopted by the social media platforms in China supporting personal information management are investigated via surveys targeting such platforms. The purpose of this paper is to find out how social media platforms understand information management, and from which aspects and through what specific methods they provide support for information management, which contributes to understanding the issues and strategies associated with personal information management on social media.

The dimensions and specific contents of the current platform support provided for information management are clearly defined by performing qualitative text analysis based on the content obtained from 11 platform policies published by five representative Chinese social media platforms.

How social media platforms support personal information management on creation, collection, utilisation, sharing, storage, protection, removal and modification is identified. By analysing the status quo of support provided by the Chinese social media platform, some issues are proposed for discussion. Improved normative management is required to address the coexistence of multivalued information and management risks. However, the user rights are limited because the platform policies tend to be more focused on the perspective of the social media platform. Furthermore, the platform policy contents regarding information management are incomplete, and the applicability of these policies should be improved.

This study seeks to contribute to personal information management on social media from the perspective of platform support. The perspective from the platforms as the service providers supporting information management also helps identify information management challenges and potential strategies. Furthermore, combining with the personal information management perspective, this study provides a background understanding of information management under a social collaborative framework for platforms, authorities, users and memory institutions.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-06-2020-0249

This research explores the path that social media influencers affect target consumers to purchase a certain brand posted in their contents.

Using a sample of 510 Weibo users in China, the conceptual model is tested by structural equation modeling (SEM) in Lisrel 8.8 statistical software.

This study examined that influencers' source characteristics stimulate consumers' positive attitudes (image satisfaction and/or advertising trust), in turn affect consumers' purchase intention. The expertise, originality and homophily of influencers positively affect two attitudes of consumers. The attractiveness only positively affects image satisfaction, and the interactivity only positively affects advertising trust. Besides that, this study also verified the mediating role of consumers' self-brand connection between the two attitudes and purchase intentions.

By distinguishing two different attitudes of consumers and incorporating consumers' self-brand connection, we proposed a complete theoretical framework for the overall mechanism of influence marketing based on communication–persuasion matrix.

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.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how consumer brand engagement (CBE) promotes brand love and eWOM within the influence of brand interactivity and consumer involvement, especially in the context of the smartphone industry and Chinese social media marketing. This study also examines the important role of brand love and gender in this relationship.

Data from 403 participants who are followers of the smartphone brand’s social media page was collected via an online survey. PLS-SEM was also used for examining the research model.

The findings of this research reveal that the (perceived) brand interactivity, and consumer involvement, are key factors influence CBE. As expected, brand love and consumers’ eWOM intention are significant outcomes of CBE. In particular, the relationship between CBE and consumers’ eWOM intention is mediated by brand love. However, gender did not moderate the proposed relationships.

By integrating social exchange theory and attribution theory, this study deepens the understanding of CBE and brand love by examining the relationship between brand interactivity, consumer involvement, CBE, brand love and eWOM in the context of smartphone and Chinese social media marketing.

The COVID-19 has become a global pandemic, which has caused large number of deaths and huge economic losses. These losses are not only caused by the virus but also by the related rumors. Nowadays, online social media are quite popular, where billions of people express their opinions and propagate information. Rumors about COVID-19 posted on online social media usually spread rapidly; it is hard to analyze and detect rumors only by artificial processing. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel model called the Topic-Comment-based Rumor Detection model (TopCom) to detect rumors as soon as possible.

The authors conducted COVID-19 rumor detection from Sina Weibo, one of the most widely used Chinese online social media. The authors constructed a dataset about COVID-19 from January 1 to June 30, 2020 with a web crawler, including both rumor and non-rumors. The rumor detection task is regarded as a binary classification problem. The proposed TopCom model exploits the topical memory networks to fuse latent topic information with original microblogs, which solves the sparsity problems brought by short-text microblogs. In addition, TopCom fuses comments with corresponding microblogs to further improve the performance.

Experimental results on a publicly available dataset and the proposed COVID dataset have shown superiority and efficiency compared with baselines. The authors further randomly selected microblogs posted from July 1–31, 2020 for the case study, which also shows the effectiveness and application prospects for detecting rumors about COVID-19 automatically.

The originality of TopCom lies in the fusion of latent topic information of original microblogs and corresponding comments with DNNs-based models for the COVID-19 rumor detection task, whose value is to help detect rumors automatically in a short time.