Social media adoption and corporate disclosure

Abstract

This study examines 9,861 public firms to investigate the current adoption status of two popular social media platforms (Facebook™ and Twitter™) and their application in corporate disclosure. The investigation is based on the framework defined by Meek, Roberts, and Gray (1995) and on variations in platform, industry, firm size, time, and intensity (i.e., accounts owned, messages released, and user interaction). The results show that 49 percent of the firms have adopted one platform, and 30 percent have adopted both platforms. However, the numbers of new adopters on both platforms have been decreasing continuously since 2010, even though more than half of the firms are yet to adopt either platform. The results also show that 7.06 percent and 3.45 percent of Facebook and Twitter messages, respectively, are related to corporate disclosures. On average, users respond more quickly to disclosures released on Twitter (13 minutes) than on Facebook (25 minutes), whereas disclosures on Facebook have longer user engagement (427 minutes) than those on Twitter (10 minutes).