Prior research has examined how companies exploit Twitter in communicating with investors, and whether Twitter activity … predicts the stock market as a whole. We test whether opinions of individuals tweeted just prior to a firm's earnings … announcement predict its earnings and announcement returns. Using a broad sample from 2009 to 2012, we find that the aggregate …

individuals may be used to predict the stock market as a whole, and how Twitter activity relates to earnings response coefficients …Prior research examines how companies exploit Twitter in communicating with investors, how information in tweets by … (the beta from the returns/earnings regression). In this study, we investigate whether analyzing the aggregate opinion in …

earnings news. We find that visuals in firm Twitter earnings announcements are associated with more retweets, consistent with …We propose the visual attention hypothesis, that visuals in firm earnings announcements increase attention to the … greater follower engagement with announcements with visuals. This result holds for earnings tweets sent by the same firm and …

earnings announcements. Facebook activity is generally higher for firms with higher levels of analyst following, individual … around earnings announcements, with the increase being largely attributable to posts containing earnings news. In general …, therefore, firms use Facebook posts to amplify earnings news. Such activity is selective, however; it is lower for firms with …