2025/04/30 by Darian Harff, Paula Stehr, Desirée Schmuck · 3 voices · 4 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Media Influence and Health #Impact of Technology on Adolescents #Digital Marketing and Social Media
paper · doi:10.1177/14614448251336441
Social media influencers (SMIs) are ordinary people who rise to fame via social media. These individuals have repeatedly been labeled as opinion leaders, but often without in-depth theoretical reflection. We fill this gap by introducing a novel typology that allows for greater scrutiny in the identification of different types of opinion leaders in the modern media environment. Using this typology, we adequately capture—for the first time—opinion leadership as practiced by actors like SMIs, describing them as Proximal Mass Opinion Leaders (short: ProMOLs). We highlight that—despite their reach—ProMOLs exert a seemingly interpersonal and horizontal influence by engaging in personalized communication with opinion followers in self-built networks. Furthermore, we theoretically model the various flows of communication between ProMOLs, their communities, and other actors in the public sphere, thereby illustrating the multiple layers of ProMOLs’ impact. Finally, we discuss the model’s implications and suggest directions for future research.