Credibility-enhancing tactics for social media corporate disclosures

Abstract

This study examines two credibility-enhancing tactics when managers use Twitter as a platform to disclose a message about an employee training programme, which is an important dimension of corporate social responsibility (CSR). I conduct an experiment where I manipulate (1) whether a firm’s CEO retweets the company disclosure tweet in their personal Twitter account (hereafter, ‘retweeting’), and (2) whether the company’s tweet mentions the organisation that cooperates with the company’s CSR activities when the organisation, as an involved party, has a verified Twitter account (hereafter, ‘mentioning’). I document higher disclosure credibility for retweeting than non-retweeting, as it establishes a closer association between the CEO and the message. In addition, mentioning increases the social presence of the parties involved, as users can observe the interactions between them and the disclosing firm in real time. Furthermore, I find that the higher social presence of an involved party (e.g. customers, suppliers, and managers) due to mentioning results in higher disclosure credibility. Finally, investors are more likely to sceptically scrutinise signals from an internal party, which makes CEO retweeting less effective than mentioning. The effect of retweeting is subdued when both tactics are used.