Investigating influential factors influencing users to share news in social media: a diffusion of innovations perspective

This study aims to investigate the factors influencing news sharing in social media. Drawing from the diffusion of innovations theory (DOI), the influential factors identified are opinion leadership, homophily, tie strength, and news attributes. By incorporating social network analysis with multiple regression analysis, our results indicate that opinion leadership was the strongest factor predicting users' news sharing, followed by news attribute and tie strength. Unexpectedly, we also found that homophily hampered news sharing in social media. Implications are discussed