The Role of Opinion Leaders in the Sustainable Development of Corporate-Led Consumer Advice Networks: Evidence from a Chinese Travel Content Community

Online community marketing and social media influencer marketing have aroused the interest of many researchers and practitioners around the world. Companies building online content communities to implement community marketing and influencer marketing has become a new corporate strategy, especially in the tourism and hotel industries in which experiential products are sold. However, based on the content community, maintaining the sustainable development of a consumer advice network composed of opinion leaders and consumers is a major challenge. This paper selects the travel content community of Qunar.com as the research object to study the role of opinion leaders in the sustainable development of corporate-led consumer advice networks (CANs). Empirical evidence based on network evolution data from 1356 “Hotel Sleep Testers” across 11 years shows that: (1) the creation and provision of information can obviously increase the probability of the relationship construction and increase the number of relationships, thus facilitating the formation of opinion leadership (OL); (2) active participation in interactions and withhigh-quality information brings greater effects; (3) the network structure variables, such as preferential attachment, structural equivalence, and similarity, can also better predict the probability of a potential relationship; and (4) reciprocity in consumer advice networks has no significant impact on the establishment of network relationships.