Credibility-enhancing tactics for social media corporate disclosures
研究了经理人在推特上披露员工培训计划(企业社会责任)时,CEO转发和提及合作方两种策略如何提升披露可信度,发现提及策略更有效,而CEO转发在两者并用时效果减弱。
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.