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| author | Shannon Elizabeth Rennie |
| title | Do Tweets Matter? Assessing the Value of Social Media Marketing |
| abstract |
This thesis explores whether marketing on Twitter increases firm value as measured by stock price returns. For years, companies have tried to quantify the effects
of marketing on business performance. Now that social media provide new platforms for marketing, companies may still be searching for the value in marketing campaigns
on sites like Twitter. It is unknown whether companies invest in social media marketing because they truly know its worth, or if they are simply doing so because
other companies are choosing to be active on social networking sites. This thesis searches for value in social media marketing on Twitter while using the social
media activity of ten retail companies on the Fortune 500. Daily sales data was not available, so stock returns were used as a proxy for sales. Appealing to the
efficient market hypothesis, if Twitter does have an effect on the business performance of a company, then information would be quickly translated into stock prices.
Volume of shares traded was used to test an alternate hypothesis that share price results from technical market movements rather than a fundamental evaluation of net
present value. After hand-gathering data over a three-month period in November, December, and January in 2015 and 2016, this research found that Twitter did not
significantly affect the business performance of the ten retail companies studied. Although the evidence provided in this paper suggests that Twitter does not
affect a company's business performance, the data used for this research is limited. Given a longer time period and/or larger set of companies across various
industries, researchers may come to a different conclusion about the value of social media marketing to companies.
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| school | The College of Liberal Arts, Drew University |
| degree | B.A. (2016) |
| advisor | Jennifer Kohn |
| committee | Marc Tomljanovich
Jonathan Reader
Summer Harrison |
| full text | SERennie.pdf |
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