Kudos, the award-winning service for accelerating research impact through strategic communications management, has today announced that its platform now tracks and measures the effect of publication sharing via Weibo and WeChat. Publishers with authors and readers in China can now gain greater insight into how these channels are used to raise awareness of published articles and books, and the relative effectiveness of each channel as a mechanism for building engagement and readership.
WeChat (often described as a Chinese equivalent to WhatsApp) and Weibo (comparable to Twitter) are the two largest social media platforms in China, with over
1 billion monthly active users. They are widely used by researchers to share information about their work to colleagues and other audiences in China, where most English-language sharing platforms are blocked.
This latest development from Kudos means publication links shared via Weibo and WeChat are now tracked in the same way as links shared via online platforms (such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, ResearchGate and Academia.edu) and via other sharing mechanisms such as email, presentations and business cards. This makes it easier for researchers, publishers and other Kudos customers to understand which platforms can best help reach a range of research audiences.
“China has rapidly grown into one of the biggest sources of both authors and audiences for scholarly publications,” comments David Sommer, Chief Product Officer of Kudos. “This development helps scholarly publishers and societies understand how those authors and audiences use the country’s two biggest social platforms; it also helps publishing staff quickly and easily amplify and recognize authors’ efforts to share via these platforms. This is crucial for ensuring that author services are truly global, and retain their competitiveness in a fast-moving, increasingly non-Western environment.”
For more information or to see this new integration in action, please contact Colin Caveney, Head of Business Development, colin.caveney@growkudos.com.
