Finishing Touches on “Knots” of Social Networks.
Opinion leaders and experts from social networks can be different, like in real life.
To clarify the notions, let me remind you that
An opinion leader is a “knot” existing in the real or virtual space of a social network, according to the communication theory. Due to his/her numerous contacts with other people and his/her personal qualities, this leader wins an audience’ trust and can influence its opinion of these or those processes or phenomena. If an “opinion leader” is simply extremely popular – he or she belongs to a category of celebrities. If at the same time his/her way of life and thinking inspires respect and even reverence – he or she is an authority in moral matters.
An expert is not necessarily a public person but necessarily he/she is competent in a particular area of knowledge and/or skills. He/she may or may not be an opinion leader. But he/she must be a super-pro, must separate the wheat from the tares and the sheep from the goats.
Besides, both opinion leaders and experts can be real or fake, like in real life.
The real ones are the people who excite interest among this or that community or the whole society and who perform the function of the so-called “knots” of interpersonal contacts networks in real life. As a rule, they pull in their audience of followers organically.
The fake ones are the people who lay claim to publicity, recognizability, and authority having no personal qualities and achievements to gain them. As a rule, they employ services of text-senders, hence their audience is made up of fake users in many cases.
Most rapidly, the following key varieties of opinion leaders/experts and “opinion leaders”/“experts” gain network popularity, for example in Facebook:
· a senior civil servant who is interesting to everybody because of his/her post;
· experts who write on a most painful topic for Ukraine, a topic of war;
· famous (mainly ill-famed) politicians, whose Santa Barbara of political and/or private life is watched by philistines with pleasure;
· famous editors or journalists with a wide circle of contacts in the media community, the expert community and in their sources surroundings;
· political and economic experts writing on unhackneyed issues with unhackneyed words;
· owners and top managers of companies whose self-importance in Facebook is supported by their employees and other people that are dependent on them (in case of PR directors, these are mass media journalists who are cooperated with systematically and not without a motive);
· “niche” (branch) experts;
· authorities in moral matters (priests, philosophers, writers);
· established or self-constituted arbiters of taste;
· talented geeks;
· common people who simply write in a merry manner and whose private life is interesting to other people because it resembles theirs.
A generous sponsorship from influential political or commercial brands or at least a possibility to make public the fact of being affiliated to them does help to gain popularity.
In other cases (though it is necessary to study each particular situation, of course), the “like” and “follow” buttons are clicked if those who write pat the audience on the back saying things that the audience wants to hear; or if they write bright and interesting stories.
Correspondingly, an average user does not like those who write complex and mind-bending things; those who say unpleasant and hard things that do not fit in fashionable stereotypes; those whose posts do not have any practical values for the user personally.
It is bad news for non-populists and non-bloviators. But you should not despair because network popularity is not equal to influence. And the politicians who cannot put down their smartphone (though some are dreaming that it will be taken away from them forever) seeking a new portion of emotions do not that much work for their reputation but rather waste time and scratch their self-importance. The world history and even the contemporary history of Ukraine clearly demonstrate that many non-public people have no less and sometimes even more influence than network babblers. That is why ratings of “the most popular” residents of social networks are similar to offline rankings of influence which can involve up to 90% of random people.
But if you are willing to tell the online community about yourself that much, the way is clear:
· you should understand why you need network popularity (set goals) and in the eyes of what part of the community it should be achieved;
· devise the figure you would like to cut in the eyes of the online community in order to reach these goals (make up your personal brand) taking into consideration the public response to online activities in the real world;
· provide high-quality content (from the point of view of “your audience”);
· create a system of mutually-beneficial information exchange with other congruous opinion leaders;
· promote the created content by SMM methods that will correspond to the goals you have set;
· secure offline backing (ideally, you should achieve synergy of real and virtual worlds activities);
· etc, etc.
Though it will not always look like this. Generations of the digital natives are growing up next to us, they are already living in the world of virtual social networks. Whose functionality and realism will only grow in terms of the user’s feelings. Time will show what kind of leaders will be in demand in this new world. Probably, a fake “leader” will be easier to recognize there. But it might be the opposite, i.e. practically impossible. Or unnecessary. Let's wait and see.