Personalized Social Media Communication Practices of Institutional Representatives
Abstract
In recent years, some diplomats have opened accounts on social media in their personal capacity, and their content strategies and audience responses still lack empirical investigation. This study takes the personal Weibo account of the Japanese Ambassador to China, Akira Kenji, as the object, and uses a combination of content analysis and audience sentiment type analysis to systematically encode and classify 329 posts and 1560 comments issued by the account from April 2024 to July 2026. The purpose is to examine its content strategy characteristics and audience sentiment tendencies. The findings are as follows. First, the posts cover five themes, with the highest proportion of food shops (32.2%) and the highest average interaction volume for festival cultural experiences. Second, positive comments accounted for 91.7%, and negative comments accounted for only 0.8%. Third, there are significant thematic differences in the distribution of negative comments: the negative proportion of diplomatic official activities is 11.6%, and that of food shops is only 0.3%. The above findings show that the personalized communication strategy characterized by daily and depoliticized content can effectively reduce the negative expression of the audience and create space for interaction at the folk level.
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