Investor proximity, social media sentiment, and stock price informativeness in the UK market

We examine whether investor sentiment on social media carries different informational value based on geographic proximity to firms. Using geo-tagged Twitter data on UK-listed firms from 2017 to 2022, we construct local and non-local sentiment measures via FinBERT model and analyze their association with stock price synchronicity. We find that only local sentiment is significantly negatively related to synchronicity, suggesting stronger firm-specific information incorporation. The effect is weaker for larger firms. Our results highlight the role of geography in shaping the informational content of social media sentiment in financial markets.