Opinion Leadership Online: A Case Study on Reddit

• In Event: Same Same, But Different? Opinion Leadership in the Virtual World

Abstract

The phenomenon of online opinion leadership and the characteristics of opinion leaders within an interactive, socially shared, computer-mediated environments has largely focused on social media sites such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter. However, in Reddit, a social news site that boasts more than 112 million unique users (Reddit, n.d.-a), little is known about the posting characteristics and activity levels of opinion leaders in this group. Thus, this study identifies posters and top-level commenters who appear multiple times throughout political sub-reddits, tracing activity and posting characteristics to further identify characteristics that might explain we might categorize individuals as opinion leaders in an anonymous setting. This study advances online opinion leadership scholarship by providing insights about online opinion leadership characteristics in an environment that typically renders users detached from their offline personas. The study is based on a standardized content analysis of posts from 20 pre-identified opinion leaders-- identified by posting frequency and activity levels of posts-- in political sub-reddits. Results indicate opinion leaders in Reddit can appear in two exclusive fashions: as posters and as top-level commenters. These two types of opinion leadership have variations in posting habits, including type of post, topic of content, submission format and submission frequency. These results will be compared with previous findings of social media opinion leadership.

Bio Note
Thomas J. Johnson is the Amon G. Carter Jr. Centennial Professor and Director of the Digital Media Research Program at University of Texas at Austin.
Stephanie Geise is Assistent Professor at the University of Erfurt, Germany; her research interest are media effects, empirical methods and visual communication. She is chair of the Visual Communication Division of the German Communication Association.
Danielle Kilgo is doctoral student at the University of Texas in Austin. Her research interests include new media and socialization practices, and visual communication.

Authors

• Thomas Johnson, U of Texas - Austin

• Stephanie Geise, U of Erfurt

• Danielle Kathleen Kilgo, University of Texas