Who Is Affecting Who: The New Changes of Personal Influence in the Social Media Era

Abstract

With the development of social media, some individuals who have a great influence on the Internet have become opinion leaders, which means that the traditional agenda-setting theory cannot explain the mechanism of social consensus generation in the social media era. Therefore, the individual agenda is a new perspective to studying social consensus and personal influence in social media. This study defined the concept of the “individual agenda,” and conducted an empirical study on the relationship between the media agenda, the opinion leaders’ agenda, and the individual agenda, based on 71.77 million tweets sampled from the Twitter platform in 2015 with the approach of topic modeling. This study found that (1) most individual agendas are not consistent with the traditional public agenda, and the intrapersonal issue salience is highly related to the interpersonal issue salience; therefore, the concept of “individual agenda” has been validated empirically; (2) the media agenda has a significant positive correlation with 30.3% of the individual agendas, which means that professional media influences only a small number of individuals; and (3) the opinion leaders’ agenda has no significant correlation with the media agenda, while it has a significant positive correlation with 31.1% of the individual agendas, which means that opinion leaders have become strong competitors of traditional professional media in agenda-setting. This study also discussed the relationship between individual agenda-setting and public agenda-setting and the potential research directions in the future.