Analysis of the Article ‘’The Positive Effect of Not Following Others on Social Media’’

Analysis of the Article ‘’The Positive Effect of Not Following Others on Social Media’’

In the article ‘’The Positive Effect of Not Following Others on Social Media’’, the authors claim that besides influencers with millions of followers on social media, social media users who have fewer followers, called micro-influencers, have more impact on people because micro-influencers have stronger interaction, and following fewer people on social media brings more autonomy. They also claim that Selena Gomez with millions of followers receives hundreds of thousands of dollars per post for advertisement, and now companies prefer to collaborate with influencers that have fewer followers and work with more micro-influencers instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a post as a marketing strategy. The examples of fishermen given in this article, written in an academic format, also confirm the authors' claims. The authors cite two different fisherman social media users, Zona and Howell, and argue that although they have different numbers of followers, they have the same influence.

It is observed to have the same effect because while Zona follows 155 people on Instagram, Howell followed approximately 11 thousand people, and as a result of this sample study, first of all, using the two-step communication method, if the effect reaches too many opinion leaders in the first step, it will decrease in the second step. That is why Zona has less of a follow-up but more of an effect. Secondly, they present the findings that as people absorb increased interaction on social media, it is more effective in terms of reflecting the self of more autonomous people, thirdly, people with little follow-up are seen as autonomous, and accordingly, they can act according to their internal tendencies.

They also state that they contribute to the literature on both theoretical and knowledge. The examples given in the article, the findings obtained as a result of the study, and how the study contributes to the literature make this article stronger. Moreover, the findings found at the end of the study, on the other hand, support the thesis of the authors that having fewer followers leads to more influence. In addition, giving examples from the literature on the subject makes the research article stronger and the authors explain the importance of their research, the subject of their research, and the terms that they researched using solid sources. Such as mono-formic which means influencer sharing in a single field, and polymorphic which means influencer sharing in various fields.

In addition, the authors use their own five different experiments in this research article to support and validate their theses. In the article, the authors use a quantitative research method. With this method, they examine the importance of following and followers through various social media applications with an experimental model. The authors clearly explain how they collected the data for their experiments, and they give all the details about their analysis, the process, and the result with all the required numerical data, which makes the reader sure of its accuracy. Although the given research tables are not used explicitly, their explanations have strengthened this research article by linking the research summary and the research that they conducted to their thesis to all the finer details. With a general evaluation, the authors did not only include their thoughts, but they also answered the research subject, thesis, findings, and questions on the subject by citing sources that would support their thesis and presenting their experiments.

As a result, the authors asked the question of why marketers switch from high-follower influencers to micro-influencers in the introduction part of their research article and give their thesis that the less-follower person has more influence than, they answered and made clear both by citing sources and by comparing the opposite views in their own five different experiments, and by presenting numerical data and all details with the experimental method. They both answered and confirmed their thesis. Lastly, giving examples from different and trustable sources, giving data, analyses, examples, and experiments, and compares different points about the subject although the templates that used in the article for their experiments are not clear enough, all the methods and ways that authors used on this research article make their article strong enough.

The PDF link of the article that I used to analyze ‘’The Positive Effect of Not Following Others on Social Media’’:

http://icproxy.khas.edu.tr/login?url=https://icproxy.khas.edu.tr:4922/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=146803599&lang=tr&site=eds-live