Information Seeking through Microblog Questions: the Impact of Social Capital and Relationships

摘要

This paper investigates how users of Sina Weibo, a popularmicroblogging service in China, request informat ion byposting questions to their online social networks. The fastdevelopment of social networks and social media s uch asmicroblogging sites has greatly impacted how peopleaccess and share information. Previous research has focusedon how users share information on microblogging sites, butrelatively less is known about how users use such networksto seek informat ion. This paper addresses the gap. The dataset contains 1969 question messages from 1939 users(information seekers) and 7997 responses to these questionsfrom 3296 users (information providers), the profiles of theinformat ion seekers and providers, and their immediatesocial network (followings and followers). This paperexamined the social capital and demographic characteristicsof the informat ion seekers, and the relat ionships betweenthe informat ion seekers and providers with regards toresponse rates and number of responses as indicators forinformat ion and social benefits of information seeking.Results show that 1) questions posted by female users andverified users and messages using the “@” sign have higherresponse rates; 2) about 70%-80% of information seekerproviderpairs are physically close and have reciprocalrelationships. The study demonstrates the impact of theinformat ion seekers’ social capital and their re lationshipswith the informat ion providers in regards to the outcomesof information seeking in Weibo social networks.