Collective Attention in WeChat Public Platform

摘要

In the era of mobile internet, understanding the dynamics of collective attention in social media has been an importantly scientific challenge. Although much attention from multidisciplinary fields has been devoted to understanding the properties of collective attention in social media, these researches mainly focus on the social media that are not popular among mainland China (e.g. Facebook and Twitter). In this research, we mainly focus on one of the most popular social media among mainland China, WeChat Public Platform. We found the reading numbers of information released by each WeChat public account followed a similar pattern that grew rapidly in first 1-5 hours while saturated soon in next 5 hours. This is the first research explored the collective attention in WeChat. The detailed suggestions for further research and limitations were under discussion.