Sosyal Medya Fikir Önderlerinin Türk Sosyal Medya Kullanıcıları Üzerindeki Etkileri

The Effects of Social Media Opinion Leaders on Turkish Social Media Users

abstract

An opinion leader is someone whose views shape the views and behavior of the people around them. On social media, that's an account you choose to follow. So this study asks how much these accounts actually sway Turkish users.

After a background chapter on social media use in Turkey, microblogs like Twitter and opinion leadership, I set five research questions and turned them into hypotheses. The first three ask whether heavier use goes with following opinion leaders, and whether a leader's sympathy or negativity toward a topic rubs off on followers.

The last two ask whether sharing a worldview makes a leader's comments outside their expertise more convincing, and whether leaders who use their real name are trusted more than anonymous ones.

The survey went to university graduates who use social media and follow opinion leaders there. Facebook was the most used platform among them. But even Instagram, the least used one, was at 63 percent, and 88 percent of its users used it only on mobile.

The results were mixed. Heavier use didn't clearly go with following more opinion leaders, and most followers said a leader's positive or negative views don't shape their own.

On the other side, a shared worldview did go with trusting a leader's comments outside their field. Real names also showed a weak but positive link to credibility.

Still, most tests ran into confidence interval problems because the sample wasn't big enough, so the paper ends by calling for a larger one. I did this during my master's, and it's in Turkish.

read the pdf (Turkish)