The Role of Social Support and Influencers in Social Media Communities

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how social support functions as a coordination mechanism in social media, highlighting influencers' roles and the impact of information imperfections on content dissemination and social welfare.

Contribution

It introduces a formal framework showing social support can coordinate actions like currency, and examines influencers' dual roles in content aggregation and guidance.

Findings

Social support can effectively coordinate user actions.

Influencers act as information proxies and aggregators.

Market imperfections reduce influence costs as size grows.

Abstract

How can individual agents coordinate their actions to achieve a shared objective in distributed systems? This challenge spans economic, technical, and sociological domains, each confronting scalability, heterogeneity, and conflicts between individual and collective goals. In economic markets, a common currency facilitates coordination, raising the question of whether such mechanisms can be applied in other contexts. This paper explores this idea within social media platforms, where social support (likes, shares, comments) acts as a currency that shapes content production and sharing. We investigate two key questions: (1) Can social support serve as an effective coordination tool, and (2) What role do influencers play in content creation and dissemination? Our formal analysis shows that social support can coordinate user actions similarly to money in economic markets. Influencers serve dual roles, aggregating content and acting as information proxies, guiding content producers in large markets. While imperfections in information lead to a "price of influence" and suboptimal outcomes, this price diminishes as markets grow, improving social welfare. These insights provide a framework for understanding coordination in distributed environments, with applications in both sociological systems and multi-agent AI systems.