The Two-steps Flow of communication was first introduced by Lazarsfeld and Katz (1948). It stipulates that mass media content first reaches “opinion leaders,” people who are active media users and who collect, interpret, and diffuse the meaning of media messages to less-active media consumers. According to the authors, opinion leaders pick up information from the media, and this information then gets passed on to less-active members of the public.
The theory of the two-step flow of mass communication was further developed by Lazarsfeld together with Katz: according to them the people’s reactions to media messages are mediated by interpersonal communication with members of their social environment.
While the original theory (formulated in 1944) talked mostly about word-of-mouth conversations between opinion leaders and other members of the public, today these conversations can also happen among friends and followers on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
The Two-steps Flow Theory is definitely actual today, when you think about the roles of influencers on social media, and how they are used by brands to deliver their message to the audience.
In this case, especially with most of the Instagram stars, the process is reversed: the audience generates the celebrity by awarding them attention (likes and shares).
The brand selects the influencers that are in more in line with the message about the product (or the brand itself), that they want to deliver.
The consumer see the product (or the brand) in the hand of the influencers that they like and they embrace as well the product.
Harsha Gangadharbatla et al (2017): "even on supposedly democratic and gatekeeper-less environments like Twitter and Instagram, information propagates mostly through opinion leaders, and, more so, these opinion leaders are all connected to other opinion leaders on the medium resulting in a virtual community of opinion leaders that yield a strong influence on how and how fast information spreads on social media”.
