The next speaker in this panel on influencers at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Desirée Schmuck. Here, the focus is on ordinary people who gained popularity through their social media activities, and excludes people who are influential because of their pre-existing popularity.
Such influencers are increasingly relevant especially for young audiences, but remain undertheorised; theory tends to draw on opinion leadership, but whether this applies to influencers still needs to be examined in more detail. They do of course convey opinions, but are not necessarily knowledgeable (as the original opinion leadership model would expect), nor personally known to all their followers.
So, influencers may be understood as parasocial opinion leaders, but that concept too was developed for celebrities rather than grassroots influencers, and there isn’t necessarily always a very direct social interaction between influencers and their followers.
A new typology may be needed, then, which situates opinion leaders along two dimensions: high versus low personalised communication, and high, medium, or low status. Low status would represent self-built personal networks; high status would mean pre-existing and professionally constructed networks, while medium status have self-built public networks.
Overall, this distinguishes traditional opinion leaders (grassroots), proximal mass opinion leaders, and distant mass opinion leaders (celebrities). The extent to which any such opinion leader types are present in any one media environment may well vary considerably between countries, due to local characteristics and contexts. This framework then enables us to better investigate the specific communicative styles, approaches, and impacts of these different influencer types.
One focus here should be on the impact of the status dimension on the effectiveness of different influencers’ political communication approaches. The concept of attainability might be especially important here in the study of influencers horizontal influence, and influencer-audience booths and interactions ought to be better explore too.
