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Exploring the factors affecting content dissemination through WeChat official accounts: a heuristic-systematic model perspective

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Abstract

WeChat official accounts attract huge traffic and have an extremely high marketing value. However, as the number of accounts on the platform increases, a new concern for the account operators is garnering more traffic than competitors. Here, we employed the heuristic-systematic model to classify the influencing factors affecting information dissemination through WeChat official accounts and provided reference suggestions for the operators. We used data from nine official accounts of Beijing Sootoo Network Company as the research object and employed negative binomial regression. Our empirical results revealed that for entertainment and emotion official accounts, article titles that fit the account theme improved content spread, while they negatively affected traffic on news official accounts. We observed that the first article was advantageous when harnessed properly and that the number of images and amount of text was also crucial. Owing to time and manpower constraints, we only selected nine WeChat official accounts in this study.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially supported by fund for building world-class universities (disciplines) of Renmin University of China (Project No. KYGJA2022002) and National Demonstration Center for Experimental Education of Information Technology and Management (Renmin University of China).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information, Renmin University of China, Beijing, 100872, China

    Bo Yang, Yue Hu, Xusen Cheng & Wenjing Chen

  2. School of Information Technology and Management, University of International Business and Economics, Beijing, 100029, China

    Ying Bao

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  1. Bo Yang
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  2. Yue Hu
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  3. Xusen Cheng
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  4. Ying Bao
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  5. Wenjing Chen
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Correspondence to Xusen Cheng.

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Yang, B., Hu, Y., Cheng, X. et al. Exploring the factors affecting content dissemination through WeChat official accounts: a heuristic-systematic model perspective. Electron Commer Res 23, 2713–2735 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-022-09559-3

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