Do tweets create value? A multi-period analysis of Twitter use and content of tweets for manufacturing firms

Abstract

In this research we enquire if adoption of Twitter by manufacturing firms creates any value for the firm. We conduct two studies to examine the relationship between Twitter related activities of manufacturing firms and the market reaction towards these firms. We collect a novel multi-period dataset and analyse the overall impact of adoption of Twitter on Tobin's Q by employing a propensity score matching and difference-in-difference research design. Our findings suggest that adoption of Twitter increases the value of the firm post adoption. We also conduct additional robustness check such as use of Industry Week data as a proxy of firm value and find our results to be consistent. We adopt a text mining-based approach and examine the communication environment of the manufacturing firms. We use the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) algorithm for short texts and identify six broad topics among tweets posted by firms. Our panel regression based analysis suggests that there is positive association between divulging product related information and Tobin's Q. Our research showcases the strong impact of use of Twitter and contributes to the nascent literature on firm generated content. It is likely to encourage managers of manufacturing firms to start actively using Twitter for sharing product related information on social media.