Spatio-temporal dynamics of web pages diffused in WeChat
| Published date | 21 August 2017 |
| Date | 21 August 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/IDD-05-2017-0044 |
| Pages | 139-148 |
| Author | Liang Liu,Bin Chen,Wangchun Jiang,Lingnan He,Xiaogang Qiu |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Library & information services,Lending,Document delivery,Collection building & management,Stock revision,Consortia |
Spatio-temporal dynamics of web pages
diffused in WeChat
Liang Liu, Bin Chen and Wangchun Jiang
National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China
Lingnan He
School of Communication and Design, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China, and
Xiaogang Qiu
National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China
Abstract
Purpose – WeChat is the largest acquaintance social networking platform in China, in which users can view and reshare web pages shared by
friends. This paper aims to analyze the spatio-temporal dynamics of web pages diffused in WeChat and advice on commercials.
Design/methodology/approach – A large number of web pages diffused in WeChat are collected and exclusively divided into four categories
according to their titles, including advertisements, news bulletins, holiday greetings and emotional essays. For each web page, an information
cascade (tree structure) is constructed to describe the diffusion trace. Based on the categories, the spatio-temporal popularity is characterized; the
topological, temporal and spatial properties are examined; and the spatio-temporal diffusion velocity is explored.
Findings – Through comparative analysis, different categories of pages show diversity. For spatio-temporal popularity, there is no significant
difference in cascade size; holiday greetings usually last for a relatively short time on average; emotional essays are more likely to spread to more
provinces. For topological, temporal and spatial characteristics, the diffusion process of advertisements is more likely to be broadcasting than other
categories; news bulletins and holiday greetings have an obvious bursty; the number of viewing behavior decreases from east to west in general.
For spatio-temporal diffusion velocity, emotional essays diffuse the fastest in topological and spatio-temporal dimensions.
Originality/value – These findings contribute to promoting products and providing support for data driven modeling of information diffusion and
human activity in spatio-temporal dimensions.
Keywords WeChat, Diffusion velocity, Geo-spatio dynamics, Spatio-temporal popularity, Temporal dynamics, Topological analysis
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
The rise of social media facilitates people to view or share
blogs, images, videos and other user-generated contents.
Although a large number of contents are produced every day
in social media, only a few of them have potential to gain
massive attentions and become popular (Guille et al., 2013;
Kietzmann et al., 2011;Obar and Wildman, 2015;Watts,
2002). Numerous studies have been conducted on the
statistics and dynamics of the adoption of social media (Guille
and Hacid, 2012;Kwak et al., 2010;Zhou et al., 2013).
Moreover, the fine-grained spatio-temporal records of content
diffusion traces in social media open a new access to explore
the spatio-temporal dynamics of popular contents (Kamath
et al., 2013).
WeChat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat)isthe
largest acquaintance social networking platform in China,
which has about 938 million monthly active user accounts
(Tencent, 2017). Users can view and share information
forwarded by their friends, such as pictures with captions,
moments and even web pages. In addition, WeChat is
developing into a whole social, lifestyle, information and
shopping applications. Government regulations and
WeChat’s powerful capabilities make it difficult for other
foreign social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and Line,
to grow in China. Because of its semi-closed property, only
sporadic research on information cascade in WeChat is carried
out (Li et al., 2016;Qiu et al., 2016;Shan et al., 2017;Liu
et al., 2017), as opposed to other open social media, such as
Twitter (Banos et al., 2013;Goel et al., 2012;Taxidou and
Fischer, 2014), Flickr (Cha et al., 2009), Digg (Ghosh and
Lerman, 2011) and Sina Weibo (Bao et al., 2013). This paper
aims to analyze the spatio-temporal dynamics of web pages
diffused in WeChat and advice on commercials. The goal of
this paper is to explore the following questions:
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on
Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/2398-6247.htm
Information Discovery and Delivery
45/3 (2017) 139–148
© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 2398-6247]
[DOI 10.1108/IDD-05-2017-0044]
Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing
interests.
This study is supported by National Key Research & Development (R&D)
Plan under Grant No. 2017YFC0803300 and the National Natural
Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 71673292, 61503402 and
Guangdong Key Laboratory for Big Data Analysis and Simulation of
Public Opinion.
Received 1 May 2017
Revised 18 June 2017
Accepted 7 July 2017
139
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