Abstract
This study investigates the thematic content of Facebook disclosures from small local banks (SLBs) in Poland, their impact on Facebook users’ attention, and the economic repercussions for SLBs’ growth and performance. Based on the specificity of SLBs and existing empirical evidence, it hypothesizes that disclosures on socially responsible issues increase customer attention and can be converted into economic outcomes. To verify the posed hypotheses, several data sources are employed, including a hand-collected dataset describing the specificity of Facebook activities from SLBs in Poland between 2010 and 2017, and a stepwise research strategy is implemented. First, models of SLBs’ Facebook disclosures are distinguished. Second, the kinds of social media activities that ensure SLBs’ popularity among Facebook users are determined. Third, the thematic content of SLBs’ Facebook disclosures is related to their growth or performance indicators. The collected evidence shows that SLBs, as expected, can garner attention if they concentrate their social media activities mainly on socially responsible or local issues. Moreover, socially responsible activities and economic outcomes are generally not opposed, but only a careful selection of specific social disclosures can effectively exploit social media to the economic advantage of SLBs.
Highlights
Social media have become a natural part of daily life for billions of people
Current empirical evidence related to the impact of social media on economic outcomes mainly concerns the strengthening of customer-company relationships and engagement (Mangold & Faulds, 2009; Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010; Bolton, 2011; Tsimonis & Dimitriadis, 2014; Laroche et al, 2012; Lipsman et al, 2012; Durkin et al, 2014; Guesalaga, 2016; Gong, 2018), improving marketing efficiency (Edelman, 2010; Gallaugher & Ransbotham, 2010; Pozza, 2014; Cawsey & Rowley, 2016; Appel et al, 2020), stimulating brand awareness and loyalty (Silver & Vegholm, 2009; Farshid et al, 2011; Laroche et al, 2013; Larsson & Vitaoja, 2017), influencing purchase intentions (Adjei et al, 2010; Ponte et al, 2015; Chiang & Tseng, 2017) and the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on consumer behavior (Naeem, 2020; Sheth, 2020)
The study investigated the thematic content of posts published by Polish small local banks (SLBs) and its impact on Facebook users’ interest, as well as SLBs’ economic outcomes
Summary
Social media have become a natural part of daily life for billions of people. In 2020, their users numbered 4.1 billion, up 12% from 2019. The literature strand related to the impact of social media on financial companies seems especially underdeveloped (Filip et al, 2017; Tang et al, 2016), and it does not take into account diversity of social media content and different models of corporate social media activity. This manuscript tries to fill this literature gap. It aims to distinguish different types of social media disclosures by small local banks in order to investigate these types’ impact on customer attention, and – – on bank growth and performance
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