In Social Networks, Not All Opinion Leaders Are Created Equal

Marketers have known for a while that they need to find opinion leaders discussing their products on social networks if they want to control their branding message. But new research says there are different kinds of opinion leaders, with two types giving brands distinctly different but equally valuable types of information.

The research by Carolin Kaiser and Freimut Bodendorf of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg was published last month in Internet Research, an academic journal, and used text-mining algorithms to track discussions about Apple’s iPhone products on 17 German websites and social networks. For a decade, researchers have been looking at online opinion leaders and how a handful of people can influences the opinions of large groups of people, but Kaiser and Bodendorf were able to identify two key types of opinion leaders in social networks: discussion leaders and knowledge leaders.

Why It’s Important

Previous studies have found that 34% of Twitter users and 22% of Facebook users post opinions on products at least once a week, and those opinions have a big impact on purchasing decisions. In fact, people weigh online recommendations from other consumers equally to their own experience, and a 2009 study suggested they may place more weight on online recommendations than offline recommendations from friends when making purchasing decisions.

All of this has put a greater emphasis by marketers to figure out what people are saying about their products in online forums and to try to influence that. Just five years ago, that was a relatively easy task, as influence in different sectors was usually confined to a handful of bloggers. Now, however, big brands can have thousands of opinion leaders influencing opinions about their product, and those opinion leaders are often spread out over a wide range of social networks and online forums.