The relevance and influence of social media posts on investment decisions of young and social media-savvy individuals — An experimental approach based on Tweets

We conducted an experiment to examine the role of positive and negative tweets (generated by AI) on investment behavior of young and social media-savvy individuals, comparing them with provided historical and fundamental financials. Through mediator analysis, we discovered that positive tweets have a significantly positive mediating effect on investment amounts, while negative tweets have a negative impact. Importantly, we found that this effect is not primarily driven by the perception of the tweets; rather, positive tweets influence individuals’ perception of a company’s financials which is the most influencing factor in individuals’ investment decision. In this manner our study contributes to the existing literature by (1) proving evidence for a causal effect of social media investor sentiment on investment behavior on capital markets and especially (2) focussing how the influence channels are built.