Identifying Opinion Leaders in the Online Communities of Consumption Based on SNA

Abstract

The opinion leaders play crucial roles in affecting the purchase attentions and behaviors of consumers. Compared to the offline opinion leaders utilizing the word-of-mouth information, the online opinion leaders nowadays enable the electronic word-of-mouth information to be spread faster and be flowed to a wider population. Furthermore, with the popularity of the online communities of consumption, the influences of online opinion leaders on the potential consumers can hardly be neglected. This article begins with sorting out the current approaches for identifying online opinion leaders, points out that Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a commonly used approach for identifying opinion leaders inside SNS or online communities and analyzes how to use SNA for identifying the opinion leaders inside the online communities of consumption.