A Study on the Retweeting Behaviour of Marketing Microblogs with High Retweets in Sina Weibo

This research studies marketing microblogs with high retweets in Sina Weibo. The content features of marketing microblogs, the structural and temporal characteristics of retweet networks, the major features of retweeters, the incentive mechanisms for retweeting, and the influential retweeters are investigated. A microblog dataset including 19,889 microblogs from 20 enterprise accounts and a retweet network dataset including 207,649 retweets and 113,755 retweeters are analysed. This analysis shows that the marketing microblogs with high retweets are normally the results of some incentive mechanisms, high percentage of their retweets are retweeted from the original microblog directly, the frequencies of retweets vary over the activity periods, incentive mechanisms can significantly affect the behaviour of retweeters, and influential retweeters have significant impact on arousing subsequent retweets. These results could be utilized by enterprises for improving their marketing activities.