Accounting and Social Media: A Structured Literature Review and Research Avenues

Abstract

Purpose: Over the last ten years, social media gradually gained an increasingly active and relevant role in social and economic and corporate contexts. Particularly, social media plays a key role in accounting issues such as corporate strategy, corporate disclosure towards stakeholders, balance sheet and reporting. Thus, social media has become the easiest and most immediate way for companies to make execution of strategies and disclosure information and in general manage several accounting issues. In this scenario, this paper has the purpose to investigate the relationship between accounting and social media to draft emerging research paths and future avenues of research understanding what role social media is playing in companies and their value. Design/Methodology/Approach: We adopted the structured literature review (SLR) to draft emerging issues and future avenues in this field. This methodology contributes to identifying research trends and future research directors (Di Vaio et al.,2021; Secundo et al.,2020; Popay et al.,2006; Jesson and Lacey., 2020). Investigating relevant literature, we selected the range of keywords to compose the research query, we validated our results on Scopus database using the operator “TITLE-ABS-KEY”. In Line with our purpose we limited research query only to “final” documents published in “English” between 2018 and 2022. We conducted a not grey analysis identifying 206 articles about the theme of accounting and social media.Findings: Our analysis provides results on emerging issues and avenues in this research stream. Emerging issues are directed towards the relationship among accounting and social media, the effect of social media on the company system, how social media can serve a strategic level in the company, the role of social media in the organizational system, how social media are regarded by investors and so on. Originality/value: Our research contributes to increase the study on accounting and social media to offer readers a renewed perspective of study drafting the future research avenue.