Research on influencing factors of information diffusion in online social networks under different themes

Data mining analytics investigate WeChat users’ behaviours: online social media and social commerce development

Purpose

As of December 2021, WeChat had more than 1.2 billion active users worldwide, making it the most active online social media in mainland China. The term social commerce is used to describe new online sales through a mix of social networks and/or peer-to-peer communication or marketing strategies in terms of allowing consumers to satisfy their shopping behaviour through online social media. Thus, given the numerous active users, the development of online social media and social commerce on WeChat is a critical issue of internet research.

Design/methodology/approach

This empirical study takes WeChat as the online social media research object. Questionnaires for WeChat users in China were designed and distributed. All items are designed as nominal and ordinal scales (not Likert scale). The obtained data was put into a relational database (N = 2,342), and different meaningful patterns and rules were examined through data mining analytics, including clustering analysis and association rules, to explore the role of WeChat in the development of online social media and social commerce.

Findings

Practical implications are presented according to the research findings of meaningful patterns and rules. In addition, alternatives to WeChat in terms of further development are also proposed according to the investigation findings of WeChat users’ behaviour and preferences in China.

Originality/value

This study concludes that online social media, such as WeChat, will be able to transcend the current development pattern of most online social media and make good use of investigating users’ behaviour and preferences, not only to stimulate the interaction of users in the social network, but also to create social commerce value in social sciences.

Characterizing Chinese online public opinions towards the COVID-19 recovery policy

Purpose

The online users’ characteristic information can provide decision support for policy-designing and construction of public strategies. Hence, this paper aims to conduct online public opinion mining on the recovery policy stimulating the economies stroked by COVID-19 epidemic. Also, sentimental analysis is performed to uncover the posters’ emotion towards the target policy.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper adopts bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) as classifier in classification tasks, including misinformation detection, subject analysis and sentimental analysis. Meanwhile, latent Dirichlet allocation method and sentiment formulations are implemented in topic modelling and sentiment analysis.

Findings

The experimental results indicate that public opinion is mainly non-negative to the target policy. The positive emotions mainly focus on the benefits that the recovery policy might bring to stimulate economy. On the other hand, some negative opinions concerned about the shortcomings and inconvenience of the target policy.

Originality/value

The authors figured out the key factors focused by the public opinion on the target recovery policy. Also, the authors indicated pros and cons of the recovery policy by analysing the emotion and the corresponding topics of the public opinion on social media. The findings of the paper can be generalized in other countries theoretically to help them design recovery policy against COVID-19.