Rapport building by Chinese celebrities on Weibo and Facebook
The paper examines how Chinese celebrities build rapport with their followers on social media, with a comparison
between the Chinese mainland (on Weibo) and Hong Kong (on Facebook) celebrities. Rapport building is conceptualized as language
use in promoting social bonding and emotional involvement and as achieved via at least two aspects: use of relational acts and
choice of interactional features. Twelve months of postings by twelve most-followed Weibo and Facebook celebrities from the
Chinese mainland and Hong Kong in 2017 have been retrieved and analyzed. It is found that the prevalent relational acts commonly
used by both Weibo and Facebook celebrities to build rapport with their followers include sharing information, retweeting
information and directives, among others; and the commonly prevalent interactive features include the use of colloquialism, emoji
& emoticons, and hashtags or @, and the like. Nonetheless, significant differences also exist in that while Weibo celebrities
tend to use more acts of showing stance, Facebook celebrities use more acts of showing appreciation; Weibo celebrities tend to use
more colloquialism, emoji & emoticons, and internet slang, Facebook celebrities tend to use more English codemixing and
vernacular expressions. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion and explanation of the commonalities and differences
between Weibo and Facebook celebrities.
Article outline
- 1.Sociolinguistic contexts of Hong Kong and mainland China in the internet age
- 2.Relational work on social media
- 3.Methodology
- 3.1Defining rapport and research dimensions
- 3.2Data collection
- 3.3Data coding
- 4.Analysis of the data
- 4.1Relational acts by Weibo and Facebook celebrities
- 4.2Interactional features by Weibo and Facebook celebrities
- 5.Discussion & conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
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Discourse, Context & Media 47
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