The impact of social media influencers on the financial market performance of firms

Abstract Despite the huge growth in the number of influencers and their use by firms, there is a lack of analysis of how social media influencers affect the financial market performance of firms. Anecdotal evidence suggests mega influencers can impact the stock prices of firms via social media. We ask whether such an effect is generalizable to all mega influencers and other financial market characteristics of firms. Using a hand‐collected data set of 16,156,419 mega influencer posts on Instagram, we find that mega influencers affect investors' attention, volatility and trading volume but not stock returns. It takes top influencers with extreme sentiment posts to affect returns and, even here, the effect is short‐lived.