50 Million Followers Can’t Be Wrong, or Can They? The Influence of Social Media on CEO Communication

Abstract

The rise of social media introduces new ways in which executives communicate and receive feedback on their words and actions. Social media feedback is generated quickly in large volumes with a format that discourages in-depth critical feedback (e.g., availability of only “like” option), from partly unknown (and unknowable) and heterogeneous sources. In this paper, I theorize and test how long-term exposure to social media feedback influences the communication patterns of CEOs. Through applying novel machine learning methods on 820,000 communication threads of CEOs from S&P 1500, I found that long-term exposure to aggregate social media feedback increases the frequency and affective tone of communication. The relationship is moderated by recent textual feedback. These findings have important implications for the literature on CEO communications and feedback.