Opinion Representative: The Content Hierarchy and Its Cohesion in Micro Blog Society

Purpose/Significance This paper defines the users’ role and phenomenon of opinion representative from opinion leader, and examines the systematic effect of micro blogs’ opinion representative phenomenon on social network content hierarchy aggregation. The opinion representative denotes the stratification of influence rather than the diffusion of influence, which presents more closed users’ content hierarchy and its regular change mechanism through the micro blog online society. Design/Methodology Through micro blog user samples collected by web crawler, combined with LSA and other text mining methods, based on test of empirical phenomena, this paper puts forward the effect model of opinion representative—content hierarchy and conducts path analysis. Findings/Conclusions On the one hand, the direct role of opinion representatives allows users with similar influence to render similar content, resulting in content hierarchy differentiation. On the other hand, the positive correlation between the roles of opinion representative and opinion leader and their joint effect contributes to the denser internal convergence degree of users’ content hierarchy with the rising hierarchy influence, resulting in pyramid structure. Given that opinion leader is the mainstream research object of various research centers, it is necessary to strengthen the analysis of the role and characteristics of opinion representative, and fully explore its system function and social effect in the social network.