With the rapid development of online communities and social networks, marketers have started to use online opinion leaders to influence their social circles. In this study, we use a review dataset generated from an online forum to empirically investigate social influence on reviewers' eWOM motives and readers' feedback. Our results show that, first, community members' reviews are not influenced by their forum involvement. Their evaluations mainly depend on product attributes. Second, the reviews from those who have established their expertise in the community generate more ‘buzz’ and more trust among online forum readers compared to reviewers with less expertise. The findings indicate that certain marketing strategies, such as ‘seeding’ targeted towards opinion leaders, may work better than a general buzz marketing strategy targeted towards a general audience. Our results also provide useful guidance on how to identify opinion leaders in the online community.
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