A Comparative Study on Discourse and Dissemination Effect of Official WeChat in Universities

Abstract

The official WeChat account in universities is an important channel for information dissemination and image building of colleges and universities, carrying the responsibilities of education, publicity and public opinion guidance. A comparative analysis is made on the reports from the official WeChat accounts of two universities with different dissemination effect by the form of corpus analysis. The official WeChat account of University B takes serving teachers and students as its main responsibility, and constructs the discourse image of a service-oriented and education-oriented university; while the official WeChat account of University A also pays attention to ideological education and services for teachers and students. The number of ideological education reports ranks the first and the external publicity reports are its characteristics, thus constructing the discourse image of educational, reputation-oriented and service-oriented university. In terms of dissemination effect, the count of reports reading from the official WeChat account of University A is affected by both discourse content and discourse form; the count of reports reading from University B is influenced by discourse content and discourse subject. Finally, the paper puts forward some suggestions on improving the dissemination effect of official WeChat account in universities.