  Trends in online social media always reflect the collective attention of a
vast number of individuals across the network. For example, Internet slang
words can be ubiquitous because of social memes and online contagions in an
extremely short period. From Weibo, a Twitter-like service in China, we find
that the adoption of popular Internet slang words experiences two peaks in its
temporal evolution, in which the former is relatively much lower than the
latter. This interesting phenomenon in fact provides a decent window to
disclose essential factors that drive the massive diffusion underlying trends
in online social media. Specifically, the in-depth comparison between
diffusions represented by different peaks suggests that more attention from the
crowd at early stage of the propagation produces large-scale coverage, while
the dominant participation of opinion leaders at the early stage just leads to
popularity of small scope. Our results quantificationally challenge the
conventional hypothesis of influentials. And the implications of these novel
findings for marketing practice and influence maximization in social networks
are also discussed.

Social and Information Networks;Computers and Society;Physics and Society