Research On The Identification Of Opinion Leaders Of China-related Issues On Facebook

“Telling a good Chinese story and spreading a good Chinese voice” is General Secretary Xi Jinping's new request for China's foreign communication strategy.However,in view of the overall international public opinion pattern,China's comprehensive strength of external communication is still weak;western public opinion hegemony still exists,and the effect of external communication is still not ideal.Based on Lazarsfeld's “two-step of flow theory”,this paper discusses,identifies and analyzes the types and characteristics of opinion leaders on western social media Facebook,in order to grasp the communication nodes in events,guide the public opinion more accurately and timely,and finally promote the process of problem solving.This paper uses social network analysis to identify the “opinion leaders” of China related issues on Facebook.Firstly,based on the social network analysis method,this paper constructs the opinion-leaders' identification index,then uses the Analytic Hierarchy Process to determine the weight of each index;Secondly,take the western social media Facebook as the representative,and take the “Global China” group as the research object,mining all the posts and the most active 167 users' data from 1st October 2017 to 10 th October 2018,using the social network analysis tool UCINET to analysis the relationship of these users.Finally,use identification index model to identify the opinion leaders and verify the model.As a result,the types and characteristics of “Opinion Leaders” regarding China-related issues were analyzed,and corresponding enlightenments were put forward.The indicators of identification model mainly include: Degree Centrality,Closeness Centrality,Betweenness Centrality,Bonacich Power Index.There are four types of Opinion Leaders in this group: Chinese opinion leaders,overseas workers' opinion leaders,international students' opinion leaders and other nation's opinion leaders.Their characteristics are as follows: Firsty,opinion leaders tend to focus on China's political or diplomatic / international issues;secondly,their information reprint mainly comes from western media;thirdly,opinion leaders have 8-10 years of social media use,and fourthly,they share 1850 pieces of information per users and 5 pieces per day in this period of time;fifthly,opinion leaders are mainly come from the United States;last but not least,most of the opinion leaders are professional and technical personnel.To better guide these opinion leaders,the paper insists that we should strengthen public opinion monitoring and the power of mainstream media,guide opinion leaders according to its kind,and weaken the cultural constraints in order to expand the influences.