Introduction
With over 3.6 billion people using social media worldwide, it is indeed true that, as a society, we are highly dependent on the content provided by social media.
This high traffic and popularity have been ever-growing since the birth of the large social media corporations we know today: Facebook, Twitter, etc. Therefore, it would be quite foolish for businesses to avoid such a potentially immense consumer space, which is why business and social media have been entangled for years.
Due to the past decade of extraordinary growth, social media has such a large consumer base that an entirely new branch of marketing (social media marketing) has been created in most businesses.
The role of these social media marketers is to not only increase the awareness of the brand but also to monitor the view of the brand and the public’s perception of it. This monitoring of social media by businesses is called sentiment analysis. Through this method, analysts are able to detect their consumers’ opinions about the product they offer, allowing them to improve the product and utilize consumer feedback efficiently. This can be especially useful with the general rise in sharing emotions on social media platforms. On the other hand, with the influx of “cancel culture”, where widely disliked people are “canceled,” social media can severely blemish the image of a person or a company.
Of course, this is almost always a result of mistakes by the “canceled” group, but where the controversiality lies is whether a mistake should determine the trajectory of one’s entire career or a business’. For example, Pepsi was criticized by “cancellers” for the advertisement involving Kendall Jenner that appropriated global protest movements. Without a doubt, this was a mistake on Pepsi’s part and an advertisement like this shouldn’t have been made and also approved to be aired.
However, this advertisement was one of many advertisements that Pepsi has created, so the notion of punishing a business for one mistake and attempting to tarnish the reputation of that business permanently is debatable. In contrast, social media’s impact on business can be beneficial as well, which is seen with Ellen Degeneres’s (someone who was later canceled) partnership with Samsung during the Oscars.
Through a single selfie with a crowd of celebrities, she was able to bring nearly $1 billion in revenue for Samsung. Clearly, there are two sides to social media’s potentially colossal impact on the state of a business. However, could social media have such an enormous impact to the point that it may even affect the stock market?
Social Media’s Impact on Business
LinkedIn and other social media platforms, for a long time, have been a predominant factor in many people’s paths to achieving career goals.
By providing users the opportunity to post their resumes, skills, experience, and achievements, these social media platforms have greatly improved the process of job recruitment. Businesses can not only use this to hire applicants but also to find potential clients for their organization and build connections. Essentially, platforms such as LinkedIn provide a community space for businesses, aspiring individuals, and clients to communicate effectively. With 675 million monthly users, 30 million businesses, and 4 out of 5 users who drive business decisions on LinkedIn, it is no surprise that social media platforms can play an immense role in corporate decisions.
In addition, with endorsements from celebrities through Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook campaigns, social media can impact the trajectory of the entire business. For example, one extraordinarily successful partnership was between Red Bull and Felix Baumgartner. Felix Baumgartner is an Australian Daredevil who partnered with this corporation for a record-breaking skydive. Termed the Red Bull Stratos, Felix participated in a supersonic freefall, jumping from 128000 feet, and reached 833 MPH.
This event fell in line with Red Bull’s past appeal to extreme sports and was one of its most successful, recording 52 million views across social media platforms. Because of this event, the company’s sales went up by 7% ($1.6 billion). With the power of social media, Red bull improved the image of its brand.
However, while the positives of social media’s impact on businesses are substantial, there are also some negatives. For example, it is extremely difficult to create a cohesive and positive brand image for your company. In fact, brands are so susceptible that they can lose their reputation in minutes from a failure to convey authenticity. Furthermore, even if the authenticity is conveyed, if a few don't like it, they are free to show their discontent without any repercussions, which may negatively influence other potential buyers. The major issue here is that one’s view can be augmented tremendously and have trickling effects on others.
Also, there is no assurance that your employees will effectively uphold the image of the business you want to portray as it is impossible to track your employees’ social media accounts to establish continuity. Even with all of these uncertainties associated with social media, people still invest a large amount of money and effort to create and monitor an online campaign because of the benefits that may come. The impact of social media on business is so uncertain yet immense that it begs the question of can it potentially affect the stock of a business and the market as a whole?
Can this Impact Potentially Affect the Stock Market?
It is quite unfathomable to consider the possibility of a single tweet affecting the stock market. However, this could truly be a possibility. The graph (courtesy of Hedonometer.org) depicts Twitter’s average “happiness” over the course of 2020 and slightly into 2021.
The graph was made through a type of sentiment analysis AI algorithm that used keywords to gauge relative happiness. At each significant event throughout the year, there is a clear spike or drop in happiness because of the popularity of certain words. But, is this consistent with our economy and the stock market? Does the stock market actually spike and drop at these same points in time? When observing the same time period for the S&P 500 (graph courtesy of MarketWatch), it is quite startling to see how eerily similar the two graphs are.
Of course, the social issues involving George Floyd and the BLM Movement didn’t visually impact the index nearly as much as the other graph (Twitter’s happiness), but the COVID pandemic and the election undoubtedly did, creating immense drops in both happiness and index value. Though it is impossible to state with certainty that social media has had a direct impact on the stock market with merely this example, it is plausible that the same people who invest and share their emotional state on media are one and the same: collectively affecting both the economy and the relative happiness of social media platforms. With this in mind, it is clear that there is a fairly impressive correlation between the two graphs, but it does not provide enough evidence of whether a cause and effect relationship exists.
An interesting situation that can be used for further examination could be Justin Bieber’s social media campaign with Calvin Klein for its underwear line in the spring of 2015. Since January of that year, there were rumors that Bieber and Calvin Klein were collaborating. After the release of the advertisement on all media platforms, Calvin Klein and Biber accumulated 10.5 million views on Youtube alone.
Because of its virality, the campaign generated a massive increase in apparel sales during that season. However, could a social media campaign, such as this, truly generate enough revenue to improve the stock of Calvin Klein’s parent company PVH?
In spring 2015, PVH began around $101 a share at the start on March 20th. After the campaign was released on all social media platforms, and Calvin Klein likely ended its spring line, PVH closed on June 21st at around $115 a share.
Though there may be other factors that contributed to this increase in price, I am quite certain that a major factor for this nearly 14% spike in value of PVH shares is attributed to this successful campaign that Calvin Klein pulled off.
In addition, this was also seen with the immense social media influencer benefactor Nike. In general, Nike is quite notorious for working with large influencers and sports athletes as a marketing strategy. Not to much surprise, in september of 2018, Nike made an ad with Colin Kaepernick, a former 49ers quarterback.
After his highly controversial decision to kneel during the anthem, Kaepernick has never been able to return to the NFL. Many praised him for standing up for his community and saw his attempt as a peaceful way to protest, while others felt that his method offended the flag and those who died in the protection of the nation. However, Nike, a brand that is popular among minorities and especially the African American community, intelligently worked with him to continue its most famous ad campaign: “Just Do It.” Because of this decision, in September alone, Nike’s stock price rose close to 7%.
This not only provides further evidence of the correlation between social media and its influence on the stock market but also paves a new path on how some may approach social media because of its clear economic impact.
When expanding beyond the scope of an influencer campaign, to real, large businesses, there are actually other examples that show a clear connection between social media and its effect on the stock market. One prime example of this is the now $650 billion-dollar company, Tesla. After the immense growth of the Tesla stock price in the first 5 months, in May of 2020, Elon Musk, the outspoken CEO of the company, typed 33 characters and tweeted “Tesla stock is too high imo.”
What happened next was inevitable… shares fell “nearly 12% in the half hour” following his tweet (graph courtesy of CNBC). In a matter of minutes, one of the largest companies in the world lost $14 billion of its value.
It is quite astonishing how fast a stock can fall from merely a tweet.
With this clear and obvious relationship between business, the stock market, and social media, businesses have already capitalized on the power that social media yields on the general public. However, this tool doesn’t necessarily have to be limited to use by business owners, marketers, etc., but even the common citizens who want to dive into the world of the stock market and investing in general.
Social Media and Investing
Even beyond how social media impacts the stock market, is how ordinary investors like you and I can utilize social media to decide where to invest and scope the public’s opinion about a company.
With Twitter becoming the leader in instantaneous news, even faster than famous news channels and platforms such as CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, etc., it has become a haven for investors as they try to beat the market and sell or buy shares of stocks that have opportunities for increasing in value. For example, this was seen in March of 2012 with the release of the first of The Hunger Games movies: “A number of investors picked up on the fact that related hashtags were trending due to a growing interest in the books. Sensing a lucrative opportunity akin to the success of the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings film franchises, these investors bought shares in Lionsgate, the company that had secured the movie rights.” In its opening weekend alone, the movie grossed $152 million, which made it the third most successful in history, and “Lionsgate stock increased in value by 67% in the following 12 months.”
Furthermore, this wasn’t the only case where such a connection occurred and social media was used to figure out where to invest. Similar to the graph in the “Social Media’s Impact on Business,” overall sentiment on Twitter has been nearly proven to influence stock prices directly as seen in the graph. On the day of Facebook's IPO, it is clear that there is a correlation between the Facebook stock price and the measured sentiment that is expressed on Twitter.
The short period between sentiment and stock price could be the exact amount of time that an investor could potentially make a substantial amount of gains from stocks. Furthermore, research from the University of California has developed a model that can predict stock prices based on Twitter data and has found that it has been “up to 11% more accurate than traditional strategies” (convince and convert). Social media should clearly become better utilized in this sector and can even be a major factor in the ensuing world of investing. After learning about these studies and clear relationships between social media platforms’ overall sentiment and stock prices, it is clear that social media will become a part of, if not overtake, current investing strategies in the future.
Conclusion
When considering the substantial use of social media in our daily lives, the data presented in this article shouldn't come as a surprise. For several years since the outburst of large social media platforms, businesses have already established themselves in this untapped market through ads and entire branches of their business devoted to social media. As social media starts to indicate the trajectory of particular businesses and the stock market as a whole, there is so much room for improvement in approaching social media marketing partnerships, campaigns, and investing that it will be very intriguing to see what the next generation comes up with.
Sources: CNBC, Statista, MacroTrends, BBC (1), BBC (2), Convince and Convert, Forbes, Tech Crunch, Yahoo Finance, Market Watch, Hootsuite, Hedonometer, Visual Capitalist, SEJ, Buffer
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