Agenda setting in mutual fund markets: news, social media, and fund marketing in China

We analyze the effects of social attention on investment behavior. Using an original dataset covering 3,782 funds and over 240,000 news articles, we show that media attention, separated into traditional news media and social media, is associated with greater fund visibility and net inflows, consistent with a salience mechanism motivated by agenda-setting theory. Moreover, the impacts of news and social media attention are mutually reinforcing. In addition to media coverage, we analyze the role of fund-side marketing effort and find that it predicts net inflows during bull-market periods, while no such effect occurs in bear markets. Finally, we find a mutually reinforcing effect between fund-side marketing effort and external news attention. This multi-channel social attention generates a synergistic impact beyond the effect of either type of attention alone.