Consumer sentiment: The influence of social media

Since the late 1940s consumer sentiment has been used by policy makers, companies and investors as an indicator of economic mood. However, the rapid growth and spread of social media has changed the landscape of the consumer. By using a unique hand-collected dataset of more than 11 million influencers' posts, we test whether consumer sentiment is related to social media influencer sentiment. We find consumer sentiment, after testing for endogeneity concerns, is robustly related to different categories of influencer sentiment across different groupings of individuals.