Assessment of the Effectiveness of Social Media Audience Engagement by Public Opinion Leaders in Modern Russia

The article proposes and tests a methodology for analyzing the effectiveness of social media audience engagement through likes, reposts, and comments in the Telegram messenger. The paper identifies the influencers who support the discourse of civilizational identity and traditional values. At the first stage, it identifies the landmark events of the political life of Russia in 2024, at the second stage analyzes the content and set the absolute values of views, likes, reposts, and comments. At the third stage, the article calculates relative indicators, which served as the basis for creating a weighted average index of the effectiveness of influencers. This allows us to conduct a comparative analysis of the effectiveness of audience engagement. The paper identifies a few factors that affect the effectiveness of audience engagement. These include the subject of publications, clickbait, the use of video and audio formats, and the presence of a core of loyal audience. The author outlines the problem of using the «comments» function as a tool for mobilization and demobilization in social media networks.