The sustainability of mainstream media news on social media based on a nomogram—a sample of 1,100 WeChat reports from the People's Daily

To explore the characteristics of mainstream media news that becomes virally disseminated on social media platforms, we first selected and coded 1100 reports from the official WeChat account of the People's Daily during the outbreak of the epidemic. Second, we comprehensively used single-factor analysis and binary logistic regression to analyze the factors affecting the recommendation rates. Finally, a nomogram scoring system was introduced into the field of social science research for the first time, and the predictive factors identified in the multivariate logistic regression results were used to construct a nomogram prediction model. The model consistency index was 78.77% [95% CI (0.693 ~ 0.833)]. The results show that the main factors affecting the persistence of news communication include the mode of presentation for news articles, the reporting region, emotional tone, writing style, and seriality. In particular, the news presented through all media is more likely to continue to spread. The nomogram prediction model constructed in this study has relatively good accuracy and discrimination. This research can provide a theoretical basis to guide the compilation of news for major streaming media on social media platforms.