Research On The Forming Mechanism Of Content Creator’s Influence On Social Media Platforms

With the arrival of the mobile Internet era,the traditional content creation and supply mode has been unable to meet people’s rapidly growing and diverse information needs.However,social media content that can integrate collective cognitive surplus and encourage open creation has been favored by the majority of users.Social media platforms with huge user groups and massive online content have become an important way for users to obtain information.At the same time,netizens are given more initiative and expression rights,and have the opportunity to accumulate personal influence in the social network.The enthusiasm for national participation has spawned a large number of individuals and teams who are passionate about sharing and creating content,known as "content creators".Creator influence is the main evaluation basis for the value and status of individual creators on social media platforms,and is also one of the biggest driving forces for creators to contribute content.Social media platforms have accelerated the advent of the era of "the rise of the individual",and content creators have become the core of connecting platforms,users,tool and service providers,commercial resources and other roles,with a value that cannot be underestimated.Therefore,the formation law of influence of content creators on social media platforms has become an important issue concerned by the industry and academia.The formation of influence mainly comes from user feedback from creators’ content practices on the platform.As an individual content creator,the construction and promotion of influence are mainly faced with the following challenges:(1)Content is the basis for creators to establish influence on social media platforms,and the massive content selection on platforms makes individual content face fierce competition.Creators need to know how to enhance the value of their content in the context of social media so as to gain more user recognition;(2)Content creation is a continuous process.How to reasonably formulate and implement the content strategy on the platform,especially the content display on personal homepage,so as to meet the preferences of platform users and arouse the interest of more users as much as possible;(3)Attracting users’ attention and becoming followers is the key link and goal of creators’ influence construction.Creators need to know what efforts should be made to promote users’ continuous attention and active following.Therefore,from the perspective of the formation of influence of content creators,it is of great significance to solve the above challenges to explore how creators build influence on social media content platforms through multidimensional online strategies and self-presentation through the insight of real user behaviors in social media content platforms.Through the review and summary of relevant literature,it is known that the existing research on the influence of social media content creators still has the following deficiencies:(1)Previous studies have identified many characteristic dimensions that can affect the effect of content,but the selected influencing factors are often limited to specific platform scenarios and application development background.In addition,for the content produced by creators,existing studies focus on the effects of product endorsement or brand promotion and other marketing activities associated with the content.The research also needs to expand the emerging characteristics and content types of creators.(2)The existing researches usually regard the influence of creators as a dimension of the quality evaluation of information sources,but ignore the fact that influence itself is a comprehensive concept,which requires systematic studies on its connotation,formation mechanism and action mechanism.In addition,from the perspective of the core elements of influence,What factors affect the number of followers of creators on the platform is less involved in the existing research;(3)Most of the existing studies focus on the analysis and utilization of individual characteristics after the formation of influence,while the formation stage of influence,that is,the accumulation process of factors constituting influence,is not discussed,and the formation mechanism of user influence in the context of social media content platform is not fully studied.It can be seen that current researches aiming at the formation of individual influence of content creators are relatively limited,lacking comprehensive observation on the growth of creators,and taking creators as a whole brand for research.Based on this,this study carries out empirical discussion in the context of the behavior path that platform users become interested in creators and decide to follow,and systematically explores the formation mechanism of creators’ influence through the insight of real users’ behaviors in social media content platforms.In general,this study comprehensively examines the multi-dimensional characteristics and various aspects of the performance of creators on the platform,improves some evaluation methods of their abilities and strategies,and explores some new factors and their role in influence by combining the typical characteristics of creators on social media platforms.The main work and innovation completed can be summarized into the following three aspects:(1)Aiming at the foundation of influence formation,namely the value and expressiveness of creators’ content,this paper studies the influencing factors of UGC usefulness of creators on social media platforms.Based on the theoretical framework of the information adoption model(information quality and source credibility),an empirical model of influencing factors of the usefulness of social media platform UGC was constructed,including UGC-related features and creator-related features.Meanwhile,the unique functional features of social media platform,such as the role of online interaction factors between creators and users,were investigated.The model is tested empirically by using real platform data.The results show that popular UGCs depend not only on the quality of the content itself,but also on the ongoing management and maintenance of the creators through active interaction with users.This provides insights to creators on how to improve the presentation and value of their content,thereby contributing to their online performance and influence.(2)For the long-term content strategy of creators,this paper mainly focuses on the diversity of content topics in creators’ home pages.Taking real UGC posts in social media platforms as data samples,the LDA topic modeling method was first used to extract and analyze UGC posts in the personal homepage of creators,and the diversity of content topics involved by each creator was investigated to identify the content strategies used in social media platforms.The research explored the content topics most often involved by creators and the number of topics of each creator,and made variable preparations for the next step to analyze the factors that affect the accumulation of followers of creators on the platform.(3)In view of one of the most critical indicators in the influence system,that is,the scale of followers of creators,this paper discusses the factors that influence content creators to attract users’ attention and become their followers in the platform.Based on the framework of two-way processing theory in decision psychology(intuitive elements and analytical elements),an empirical model of influencing factors of the scale of followers,namely the number of fans,is constructed.Through continuous observation of real platform users,the model is tested empirically with the obtained data.The research results show that creators need to maximize the quantity and average quality of posts to prove their ability to create content,and pay attention to the interaction with users.At the same time,when publishing content,they need to ensure a certain degree of domain focus to strengthen the professional identity in the eyes of users.It provides advice to creators on how to increase the size of followers and maintain user loyalty,thus helping them increase their influence on social media platforms.By analyzing the formation mechanism of influence of content creators on social media platforms,this study promoted the enrichment and improvement of the corresponding theoretical framework and element system,expanded the literature in the field of user behavior and user-generated content on social media platforms,and provided systematic practical methods for creators to enhance influence on platforms.Based on the constructed and verified theoretical model and empirical results,it provides an important reference for social media platform content creators,platform managers and third-party partners.