Document Type
Article
Abstract
Social networking sites (SNSs) such as Facebook, Twitter and Sina Weibo have attracted millions of users and it makes social interaction become important and frequent in people’s daily life. They enjoy sharing Weibo posts with their friends. However, different posts gain different levels of attention. Why are certain contents on SNSs more viral than others? This question has attracted many researchers. Our research aims to examine what makes online contents viral on Sina Weibo. We find that if a Sina Weibo post is featuring with ease of engagement by users, or visual effect, or new knowledge, then it is more viral than other posts. Otherwise, we concluded several popular kinds of engagement from Sina Weibo: moral encouragement (e.g. good luck from micro-blogs forwarding), material reward (e.g. lucky draw) and topic discussion (e.g. product design; seeking for resonance; emotional appeal). Choosing suitable kind to manage online content can help enterprises operate Weibo marketing much better.
Recommended Citation
Fan, Sihua; Jin, Minglan; and Zhou, Zach Zhizhong, "What Makes Content Viral Online: A Study of Micro Blogs on Sina Weibo" (2016). ICEB 2016 Proceedings (Xiamen, China). 11.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/iceb2016/11