Characteristics And Effects Of Opinion Leaders On YouTube

In 1940,Lazarsfeld proposed the concept of opinion leaders in his research,arguing that such people can influence the opinions and decisions of others.Nowadays,the Internet celebrity economy is becoming more and more popular at home and abroad.Both of the number of users and opinion leaders in social media platforms are keep increasing.Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China,Xi Jinping proposed to tell Chinese stories well and build China’s international communication matrix.Then Xinhua News Agency and CGTN started to set up their own social media accounts on main international social media platforms.At the same time,a group of local opinion leaders have also begun to go overseas.Take ’Li Ziqi’ and ’Dianxi Xiaoge’ as examples,the videos they posted on YouTube about Chinese villages have gained a large number of fans.This also proves that opinion leaders are a very important part of the international communication matrix,and on international social media,opinion leaders of all types from all over the world can publish content about Chinese stories with their own views.Therefore,the characteristics of different types of opinion leaders in social media and their communication effects when telling Chinese stories are of great significance to the international communication of Chinese stories,which can help with enhancing the active role of opinion leaders in telling Chinese stories.Based on this research purpose,this study raises three related questions:1.Who are the opinion leaders who tell Chinese stories on international social platforms?What are their characteristics?2.What topics of Chinese stories do different types of opinion leaders focus on and tell?What are the emotional tendencies of opinion leaders and audiences on different topics?3.What are the advantages and disadvantages of different types of opinion leaders when telling Chinese stories,and how about their communication effects?Finally,suggestions are given from three aspects:taking advantage of different types of opinion leaders,optimizing the opinion leader matrix,and optimizing topic selection.This study takes"Chinese New Year" as the key word and takes YouTube as the research platform with the research methods of social media analysis and comparative research.First,use the GooSeeker,a crawler tool to crawl all video data from January 14 to February 5,2023(Chinese Small New Year Day to Lantern Festival),remove users with less than 1,000 fans,divide accounts according to local and overseas,official and grassroots accounts,and record the nationality of the opinion leader,the current location,the account type and other data,which are used to analyze the characteristics of the opinion leaders.In the research design,the opinion leaders’ communication effects are mainly evaluated by two index.Based on the PageRank algorithm,R(U)index represents the effects of personal influence and based on HowNet Sentiment Dictionary,S(T)index represents the sentiment index.Also the research use the NetDraw tool of Ucinet to draw a keyword network diagram,and use the CONCOR model to conduct cohesive subgroup analysis.After that,the group classification of themes were marked with topics manually.Then analyze the emotional tendencies of opinion leaders and users under different topics,and classify each topic according to high and low context,get the difference in communication strategies of different types of opinion leaders when talking about the same topic and the type of topics preferred by the audience,also the research can provide suggestions for topic selection of opinion leaders.The study found that,firstly,for overseas and local opinion leaders,it was found that the overall number and communication power of overseas opinion leaders were much greater than that of local opinion leaders,which can specify on some type overseas opinion leader,including foreign opinion leader who lived in China and come from southeast Asian countries.Local opinion leaders also have fewer types,and most of them are concentrated in the cultural and Vlog categories.However,from the perspective of the average communication effects,local opinion leaders have more advantages when telling Chinese stories.For official and grass-rooted opinion leaders,it is found that the overall number of official opinion leaders is far less than that of grass-rooted opinion leaders,but the average communication power is greater than that of latter,and the emotional value of official opinion leader is slightly lower.Apart from that,these two opinion leaders show complementary characteristics.First,they are complementary in theme.The former pays more attention to serious topics such as political news,while the latter pays more attention to soft topics.Then,they are complementary in the perspective of discourse,the perspective of the former is relatively macroscopic,the latter’s is smaller.Finally,in terms of communication methods,100%of official opinion leaders use traditional horizontal and long videos with high quality and exquisite content,while 24%of grass-rooted opinion leaders release short videos with rough content and higher output frequency.Finally,overseas and grass-rooted opinion leaders pay more attention to the theme of overseas New Year activities,local opinion leaders pay more attention to the theme of food culture,official opinion leaders pay more attention to the theme of custom culture,most opinion leaders hold positive emotions except for some political news type opinion leaders.On the other hand,audiences have a higher sentiment index for low-context content such as local New Year activities.In view of the above research conclusions,this paper gives relevant suggestions for different types of opinion leaders,pointing out that it is necessary to develop the strength of local opinion leaders and enrich their types firstly.At the same time,we need to unite the "friendly forces" among overseas opinion leaders.Official opinion leaders need to take the authoritative advantages fully,and complement each other with grass-rooted opinion leaders in terms of topic types,discourse perspectives and communication strategies.In terms of topic selection,it is still necessary to focus on low-context topics as a whole.Official opinion leaders can learn from the expression methods of overseas opinion leaders when talking about high-context topics,so as to realize the transformation of high-context content into low-context content.