Research on the factors affecting users' reposts in microblog

摘要

Microblog has rapidly developed as a recently emerging service because of its timeliness and convenience, and a large number of people utilize this service to publish and share messages on different subjects. Reposting, as one of the most important features in microblog, can apparently be considered as an efficient way of information propagation since the original tweet is propagated to a new set of users. So it will be interesting and meaningful to explore the determinants related to the information reposting in microblog. By drawing on media needs theory, this paper provides empirical evidences about factors, including the content of microblog information, users' emotions and relationships between users, affecting users' reposting intention in microblog usage. The results indicated that the intention of users to repost in microblog is positively influenced by sharing funny content, sharing novel content, sharing informative content and enhancing unidirectional relationship. However, the intention of users to repost in microblog is not significantly influenced by sharing useful content, relieving negative emotion, maintaining interconnectivity and following celebrity effect. And the intention of users to repost in microblog is negatively influenced by strengthening positive emotion, which is inconsistent with our previous hypothesis.