The role of social media in agenda building in the framework of agenda- setting theory : An analysis of the examples of the share of celebrity endorsement forming social agenda

Through developing communication technologies, new media, one of the many innovations that get into our lifes, has brought forward many novelties. One of these innovations is social media and it has changed the way how people communicate with each other. It has also provided new experiences in new settings for its users. Social media enviroments offer its users a new experience and in this new experience people express their feelings and thoughts about any topic during their communication with different people. They exchange information freely about the issues concerning today's agenda. This new experience makes users more powerful in determining the agenda. The agenda is an area that affected by the very changes that take place in public, politics or media domain. The case of new stakeholders active in agenda setting supports this new phenomenon. With the influence of social media, people do not readily accept the content offered to them as they can create their own news list with alternative contents. In stark contrast to traditional media, in social media users can direct content, express their feelings and thoughts about the agenda and even they can create the agenda itself. Shifting of agenda setting from traditional media to social media leads to emergence of new stakeholders in the process of agenda setting. The importance of these new agenda determining stakeholders with regards to social media needs to be investigated. Celebrities are one of those stakeholders. They have the potential to influence the society via their messages in social media. Their messages can reach to a wide audience. In this study, it is examined through Twitter posts, how celebrities are affected by social media trends and also how they influence social media trends. Uğur Dündar, Fatih Portakal, Cem Yılmaz, Ahmet Hakan and Yılmaz Özdil were selected according to three different polls determining 'most reliable celebrity' and Twitter followers number. The relation between their tweets during the 23 June 2019 İstanbul Metropolitan Municipality election and Twitter's Trend Topics in the same period were analyzed. In this context, the tweets of these celebrities between 21-27 June 2019 were collected and then most common words were obtained based on content analysis. Twitter Trend Topics of the same period were also collected so as to point out to the relationship between celebrity tweets and Trend Topics. The collected data were shown graphically. According to the result of this study, there is a meaningful relationship between celebrities' posts and Twitter's Trend Topics. Similarly, celebrities share content related with Twitter Trend Topics and contribute to the Twitter agenda. The results show that the study's hypotheses were qualitatively verified.