Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/55168

A major challenge in many word-of-mouth marketing campaigns is the cost-effective identification of opinion leaders. Although, opinion leaders exert influence on the other consumers, they also get influenced by other consumers. From this point, we attempt to explain their mutual influence from a social network perspective. In this paper, opinion leaders were elicited from social media of china by measuring their six structural indexes of social network analysis. 703 effective samples were collected to verify the hypotheses. The findings show that: (a) About 15% of the members are opinion leaders. They are holding almost all the communication channels, which more than the channels that other members hold. (b) Opinion leader plays an important role as connecting different relation groups which have not mutual relations (c) Opinion leader is actively accessing original information, they disseminate the information in the preceding period of information dissemination process.