A Study On The Use Of Banks’ Microblogs Based On Content Analysis And Social Network Analysis

The popularity of Web2.0has speeded up the information propagation and provided users with unprecedented interactive experience. As a new form of social media, Microblog has attracted more and more attention due to its expanding user size and powerful information transmission capability. Consumers can directly access to the latest news that they consider relevant or interesting via Microblog platform. Thus, enterprises are able to full display the brand personality through the online interaction with their consumers, and then intimate relationship will be established between them. This paper studies on the official Microblog accounts of13banks by content analysis and social network analysis. Brand anthropomorphism, information type and transmission characteristics are analyzed in detail.Our research questions are defined as "how do the banks engage in conversations with consumers","what types of information do these banks disseminate on Microblog" and "how do the different types of hot messages propagate on Microblog". To answer the first two questions, we make use of content analysis.1300messages released by the official accounts of13banks on Sina Microblog are studied as sample, and conclusions about brand anthropomorphism and information types of these accounts and messages are listed as blow. Firstly, the brand anthropomorphism levels of these banks’official accounts are quite high, and their performance varies from each other. Secondly, according to their specific contents, banks release news with three characteristics:information release is much more important than social communication; dialogue with their fans is much more important than the increase of fan number; the message expression tends to be quite official. Thirdly, the main information types released by the banks’official microblog accounts include product-related, company-related, customer-related, simple brand mention and others. The product-related messages and other messages are released the most frequently while the number of company-related messages and simple brand mention rank in the third and fourth places. Fourthly, in terms of the clustering results based on the verbs in imperative forms and information types, the microblog marketing purposes of targeted banks can be summarized as information propagation, maintenance of the relationship with fans, maintenance of brand image and improvement of brand awareness. As to the last question, the network structures and transmission characteristics of product-related message and other message are studied by social network analysis. It is revealed that the network structure diagrams of both messages are radial. The network density and discrete degree of both networks are quite low, and the message publishers are always located in the core status.