Abstract
Opinion leaders often play key roles in online knowledge-sharing communities, which has intrigued a lot of researchers and practitioners worldwide. However, it is not clear how various characteristics of opinion leaders may affect different online groups’ knowledge-sharing engagement. This paper aims to answer this question by building upon social capital theory to examine the differential influences of opinion leaders’ characteristics (interactivity, authority, and activity) on online groups. In-groups and out-groups were distinguished, and the study used the context of an investment-oriented online knowledge-sharing community. By leveraging a unique aggregated group-level secondhand dataset collected from Snowball.com, we conducted log-linear and Poisson regression models. The results revealed that the intensity of online group knowledge-sharing engagement was heavily contingent upon the types of characteristics of opinion leaders. We found that in-group knowledge-sharing engagement (generating new knowledge) was driven by an opinion leader’s interactivity and authority, whereas out-group knowledge-sharing engagement (developing new members) could not be facilitated by these types of characteristics. Instead, the opinion leader’s activity hindered out-group users from joining in-groups. The study also identified a “mutual promotion” issue, which was generated from the association between in-group and out-group knowledge-sharing engagement.
Highlights
In the current digital era, more and more people tend to spend a lot of time in online knowledge-sharing communities of interest, such as investment-oriented online knowledge-sharing communities or online knowledge-sharing communities oriented to some other fields
We considered Poisson quasi-maximum likelihood (PQML) analysis to be a better fit to portray the relationship between opinion leader characteristics and online group knowledge-sharing engagement [129]
Should acknowledge and resolve the challenges concerning the introduction of opinion leaders before they can add value
Summary
In the current digital era, more and more people tend to spend a lot of time in online knowledge-sharing communities of interest, such as investment-oriented online knowledge-sharing communities or online knowledge-sharing communities oriented to some other fields. Snowball.com (https://xueqiu.com) is one of the most popular investment-oriented online knowledge-sharing communities in China. It brings together a tremendous amount of high-quality investment-related professional knowledge (i.e., information, skills, strategies, or expertise) and highly qualified investors. Unlike other types of online communities, such as communities of transaction, communities of fantasy, and communities of relationship, such communities of interest consist of multiple groups of people interacting, sharing, and working [1]. Members of online groups rally around specific topics (e.g., a stock, an investment-grade bond, or private equity), share knowledge, or act as mentors [3]. Each online user is free to attach labels, create investment-related topics, and join groups of interest as an in-group member to share their knowledge. Out-group users can browse in-group knowledge as well as interact with in-group members
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