Empirical and modeling studies of WeChat information dissemination

Abstract WeChat is now one of the most popular social media and WeChat public account is a special “We Media” service. By gathering the pageviews of 620 articles from 140 WeChat public accounts, this study finds that there is a power law relation between the pageviews of an article and time. It means that the pageviews and the effect of an article are predictable within a short period of time. In this paper, a model of information dissemination within WeChat was established to define the new probability of a WeChat user’s willingness to share the same article. It shows that the attractiveness of information and the activeness of WeChat user have significant effects on the scope of information dissemination. These results can provide valuable theoretical references to the information dissemination mechanism of WeChat and to the governance of WeChat.

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