Who creates trends in online social media: The crowd or opinion leaders?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how trends in online social media are driven by the crowd versus opinion leaders, revealing that early crowd attention leads to widespread diffusion, challenging traditional influentials theory.

Contribution

The study provides empirical evidence that crowd attention, not just opinion leaders, primarily drives large-scale trend diffusion in social media.

Findings

Early crowd attention correlates with large-scale trend coverage.

Opinion leaders' early participation results in limited scope popularity.

The results challenge the conventional influentials hypothesis.

Abstract

Trends in online social media always reflect the collective attention of a vast number of individuals across the network. For example, Internet slang words can be ubiquitous because of social memes and online contagions in an extremely short period. From Weibo, a Twitter-like service in China, we find that the adoption of popular Internet slang words experiences two peaks in its temporal evolution, in which the former is relatively much lower than the latter. This interesting phenomenon in fact provides a decent window to disclose essential factors that drive the massive diffusion underlying trends in online social media. Specifically, the in-depth comparison between diffusions represented by different peaks suggests that more attention from the crowd at early stage of the propagation produces large-scale coverage, while the dominant participation of opinion leaders at the early stage just leads to popularity of small scope. Our results quantificationally challenge the conventional hypothesis of influentials. And the implications of these novel findings for marketing practice and influence maximization in social networks are also discussed.