Social Media and Firm Equity Value

Xueming Luo (), Jie Zhang () and Wenjing Duan ()
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Xueming Luo: College of Business, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas 76019; and Fudan University, Shanghai, China 200433
Jie Zhang: College of Business, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas 76019
Wenjing Duan: School of Business, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20037

Information Systems Research, 2013, vol. 24, issue 1, 146-163

Abstract: Companies have increasingly advocated social media technologies to transform businesses and improve organizational performance. This study scrutinizes the predictive relationships between social media and firm equity value, the relative effects of social media metrics compared with conventional online behavioral metrics, and the dynamics of these relationships. The results derived from vector autoregressive models suggest that social media-based metrics (Web blogs and consumer ratings) are significant leading indicators of firm equity value. Interestingly, conventional online behavioral metrics (Google searches and Web traffic) are found to have a significant yet substantially weaker predictive relationship with firm equity value than social media metrics. We also find that social media has a faster predictive value, i.e., shorter “wear-in” time, than conventional online media. These findings are robust to a consistent set of volume-based measures (total blog posts, rating volume, total page views, and search intensity). Collectively, this study proffers new insights for senior executives with respect to firm equity valuations and the transformative power of social media.

Keywords: social media; word of mouth; online reviews; Web blogs; vector autoregression; firm equity value; stock market performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (107)

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