A Content Analysis Of The Posts Of China-based German Embassy On Sina Weibo And Their Communication Effects

With the spread of the concepts of democracy and peace on a global scale after the Second World War,public diplomacy gradually become one of the most important way for different countries to carry out international exchanges and shape national images.Compared with traditional diplomacy,public diplomacy focuses more on the interaction between international actors and the common people in target countries.Besides,public diplomacy usually has special interests in the fields of culture,education,art,sports,economy,trade,science and technology.Media has always played a very important role in public diplomacy.With the development of social media,public diplomacy has gone through many changes.In the new media era,public diplomacy places more emphasis on the autonomy of the audience,interaction and the equal relationships between the communicators and users.Nowadays,social media has gradually arisen to be an important platform for countries to carry out public diplomacy.Therefore,it is of great significance to study public diplomacy in the context of new media.In this context,this paper selects the Sina Weibo’s official account of the German Embassy in China as the research object,analyzing the features of the content and operation of the German Embassy’s Weibo account,and evaluating the effect of public diplomacy on this social media platform.To explore the features of the content and operation of the German Embassy’s Weibo account,this paper makes a content analysis of a total of 223 Weibo interactions of the German Embassy in China’s Sina Weibo account from September 2017 to August 2018.The present study examined the features of the German Embassy’s public diplomacy on Sina Weibo from the perspective of the content,frequency of publication,language style,choice of topics,etc.Results showed that the German Embassy tended to post texts with pictures or with videos.In addition,the topics covered in the German Embassy’s Weibo are wide-ranging with rich and interesting contents.As for the language style,the German Embassy adopted the language of the new media which enhanced its attractiveness.In addition,in order to evaluate the effect of public diplomacy,this paper made a statistics analysis on the number of likes,repost and comments of German Embassy’s Weibos with reference to the previous studies.However,after analyzing the contents of readers’ comments,the researcher found that the number of likes,reposts and comments fail to tell the effect in a comprehensive way.Further classification of the comments was conducted from the dimensions of the relevance and the readers’ attitude.The results indicated that the effect of public diplomacy was influenced not only by the content,but also by the traditional diplomacy.The diplomatic events that happened in real life did have a decisive influence on the effectiveness of public diplomacy on Weibo.In the final part of the thesis,this study summarizes the problems exposed in the German Embassy’s Weibo use when the embassy carried out public diplomacy on this social media platform.Suggestions are proposed for a better public diplomacy practice both for the German and Chinese embassies in the new media era.