The Research Of Microblog Users’ Forward-based On The Theory Of Persuasion Communication

In recent years, social media flourishes in the Internet environment and bursts amazingenergy. Social media brings a vast amount of information together, and based on its powerfulinformation dissemination capabilities, it has been a very important channel for human to findout information. As a representative of the new media era, micro-blog has become the mostfavorable platform for media self-publicist and integrated marketing. The powerfulinformation dissemination capabilities of micro-blog is achieved by the users forwardingbehavior. Although micro-blog function is so powerful, it still has some problems whichcannot be covered up. True emergent and valuable contents out of the massive informationwhich appears every day cannot be spread widely. Dissemination of information should beachieved by forwarding behavior, but the research on impact mechanism with micro-blogforwarding behavior s not sufficient, the related empirical research is even fewer. For a betterunderstand of the variety of phenomena in information dissemination on micro-blog, we startfrom the most critical link-forwarding behavior, to explore why users would repost and theinfluence factors behind.This study started from the micro-blog forwarding behavior and structured on ConvinceCommunication theory. It was based on a review of the information dissemination theorywhich built a theoretical model of forward willingness study. In empirical research, we willstudy the influence to micro-blog users forwarding willingness caused by information source/information content and personal motivation by questionnaires. The main conclusions of thestudy are the following:The source of attraction in information source characteristics is namely the number ofsource fans will influence users· willingness to repost. The higher the users· psychologicalassessment towards the bloggers with more fans, the better for them to repost the bloggers·micro-blogs with more fans and attractive contents. Moreover, the credibility evaluation ofthe users towards the bloggers also influences their willingness to repost. The credibility isexpressed in two aspects of competence and trustworthiness. According to the level ofblogger·s competence, that is also called professional ability, whether the blogger istrustworthy or not the users perceived is more important.Some information features can also have an impact on users· willingness to repost. Empiricalresults shows that the order of the influential elements towards the willingness to repost is,from high to low, practicability, interestingness, and the number of reposting that has alreadyhappened. The higher of the practical value of the micro-blog, the more interesting of that, and the more number for people to repost of that, the higher willingness for micro-blog usersto repost will be.The incentive to repost is the internal driving forces to trigger the act of repost, and the sizesof the driving forces to repost under different incentives are not the same. Among thosedriving forces, incentives of self-identification, social communication and entertainment haveprominent positive influence on the willingness to repost, and the impact of incentives ofself-identification and social communication is greater than entertainment.The different levels of participation for users towards media as the micro-blog can alsoaffect the intensity of the relationship between incentive and willingness. The higher of thelevel of participation, the stronger relationship between the incentives of entertainment andsocial communication and the willingness to repost will be.