#Opinionleaders: a comparison of self-reported and observable influence of Twitter users

ABSTRACT

Social media have become forums of discussions on political and societal debates in which individual users may forward information or influence others. While prior studies either employed network analyses or surveys to identify opinion leaders and their characteristics, the present investigation combines these two approaches to address the relationship between observable and self-perceived influence. For this purpose, a retweet network of Twitter communication on the Brexit debate (N = 15,018) was analyzed in relation to a survey on motives and personality traits that was filled out by a subsample of active users (N = 98). Results showed that users’ eigenvector centrality (as a measure of influence in the network) was significantly related to their political interest and their number of followers, but not to self-perceived opinion leadership. According to a comparison of self-assessment and network position, those with stronger motivations to distribute relevant information tended to overestimate their influence in the network. Implications for the identification of opinion leaders are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Two-step flow
• opinion leadership
• opinion expression
• motivations
• network analysis
• Twitter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 When considering general self-perceived opinion leadership (six items without referring to the topic of Brexit), correlation analyses revealed a similar pattern of results with significant relationships with the subjective overestimation of influence, personality strength, motive of information, motive of persuasion, number of followers, and number of tweets (including retweets). In contrast to the calculation with eleven items (see Table 4), self-perceived opinion leadership was significantly associated with the motive of self-presentation (r = .24, p = .037), but only marginally significantly related to the number of original tweets.

2 When general self-perceived opinion leadership was averaged based on six items (without reference to the topical context of Brexit), the association with eigenvector centrality remained small in magnitude and non-significant (r = .18, p = .128).

3 When overestimation was computed under consideration of six items of general self-perceived opinion leadership, the relationship with the motive of information was marginally significant (r = .225, p = .052), but negative relationships with the number of followers and the number of original tweets were still significant.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephan Winter

Stephan Winter is Professor of Media Psychology at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany. His research interests include opinion formation and expression in social media as well as information selection in online contexts.

German Neubaum

German Neubaum leads the Junior Research Group “Digital Citizenship in Network Technologies” at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. His research focuses on how the use of contemporary social technologies influences users’ cognitions, emotions, and actions.

Stefan Stieglitz

Stefan Stieglitz is Professor at the University of Duisburg-Essen and the Director of the Research Group Professional Communication in Electronic Media / Social Media. His work focuses on communication and collaboration in digital organizations and the development of social media analytics.

Björn Ross

Björn Ross is a research associate at the Department of Computer Science and Applied Cognitive Science, University of Duisburg-Essen, and his research interests include information diffusion and predictive analytics.