Sosyal Medyada Takipçi Sayılarının Algılanan Güvenilirliğe Etkileri

The Effects of Follower Counts on Perceived Credibility on Social Media

abstract

Earlier research on social media opinion leaders showed that follower counts matter a lot, for people and for brands, if you want to be seen as one. And the counts grow through a sort of reference effect.

So I wanted to look at it from the reader's side. Does your own follower count change how much you trust someone with many followers?

The paper first covers social media use in Turkey, Twitter as the main microblog and the idea of opinion leadership. Then it runs an experiment. The same tweet was prepared as if it came from senders with high and low follower counts, and readers with high and low counts of their own rated the sender.

It's a 2x2 factorial design in two replications. Credibility is measured with Ohanian's perceived credibility scale, and interest in the topic is the blocking variable.

A two-way ANOVA showed that both counts, the sender's and the reader's, had a significant effect on trust. Their interaction wasn't significant though (p = 0.081), and interest in the topic made no meaningful difference.

Actually, the pattern depended a lot on who was reading. Readers with many followers cared much more about the sender having a high count too, maybe because they expect someone to be at least at their own level before they trust them. But that needs proper qualitative and quantitative work to confirm.

Readers with few followers trusted the message more overall, whatever the sender's count. I wrote it in Turkish during my Ph.D. studies.

read the pdf (Turkish)