Understanding the power of opinion leaders' influence on the diffusion process of popular mobile games: Travel Frog on Sina Weibo

摘要

As mobile games are growing in acceptance for players, several theories stress the importance of opinion leaders' influence on game adoption. Opinion leaders who exert a disproportionate influence and have more followers are noted as key opinion leaders (KOLs). For a systematical literature review, we find that few game-related studies focus on KOLs' influence on the information diffusion process. To fill this gap, we utilize 301,389 users' data on Sina Weibo to analyze the information transmission trend and KOLs' influence. The findings imply that KOLs play crucial roles in information diffusion especially in the original period, celebrities have many more followers than others, yet more followers do not mean more interactions. When the number of KOLs' retweeting and interactions significantly increases, it leads to the scale of network rapid growth. Besides, the keywords of user-generated content (UGC) are similar in the whole diffusion process, and when the top KOLs forward a game-related topic, the number of related words rapidly increases.