Influencers and Young Followers. Analysis of their Communicative Interactions

Content creators on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and Twitch are a fundamental part of adolescent culture, as they act as influencers, leaders and referents in the consumption of multimedia products aimed at the adolescent public. Communication research must intervene in the analysis of the possibilities and risks of these virtual spaces, in which not only consumption practices but also forms of coexistence and values of democratic systems are organised. The aim of this paper is to study the communicative interactions generated on social networks such as YouTube and Instagram in the profiles of the influencers with the most followers among teenagers in Spain, based on the number of contents generated and the responses they receive from users. Using natural language processing (NLP) techniques and sentiment analysis, 10 influencers with the most followers were studied, extracted from 2,749 questionnaires carried out among young people aged between 12 and 18 in Spain. The results show that while the number of views is strongly correlated with the number of likes reflected in the 2.142 videos, there is no strong correlation with the number of comments. This points to the need to revise the concept of audience engagement. Furthermore, although the 'positivity bias' prevails in the expression of emotions between influencers and followers, the analysis of the polarity of the titles of the videos analysed shows a high percentage of neutral and negative polarity, as strategies for attracting attention. In relation to the analysis of the word-clouds, it is observed that the comments of influencers and followers tend to have a positive and neutral polarity, under a redundant communication model in its bidirectionality. The conclusions point to the social and marketing implications of the power of influencers.