Social media and company stock performance : a thematic and bibliometric review

Theoretical background: The latent impact of the social media on company stock market performance or equity value has already been empirically studied. It is still in its infancy, although it has received increasing attention over the past few years. No efforts have yet been made to systematically review these studies in order to provide researchers and practitioners with an overview of the state-of-the-art links between social media and stock market performance of companies. This makes our work different from other recently published review papers on social media.

Purpose of the article: The goal of this paper is to review, systematize, and integrate existing research on links between social media releases and stock performance, including research production timeline, global contributions, source analysis, affiliations, author locations, and citations of studies on social media (Twitter especially). A further objective is to comprehend the conceptual and intellectual structure of the relevant literature and to identify the knowledge base of social media use in investor relations and financial communication.

Research methods: This study employs thematic and bibliometric analysis methodology on 135 peer reviewed papers obtained from two databases (Web of Science and Scopus) and provides an analysis of science mapping, including co-citation analysis, bibliometric coupling, word analysis, and trending topics regarding the relationship between social media releases and stock performance.

Main findings: Our results provide three emerging clusters: (1) company stock performance, (2) investor or sentiment analysis, (3) user-generated content and several niche topic clusters: (4) corporate governance and disclosure (5) capabilities and earnings management and (6) economic and social effects. This study indicates that social media have significantly altered the corporate information landscape. Companies and information consumers must incorporate the new channels into their information dissemination or acquisition, and decision-making processes.