As firms increasingly use social media to provide disclosures to investors, it is important to understand whether the characteristics that are associated with these disclosures lead to different reactions from investors than disclosures provided via more traditional channels. In this paper, we use an experiment to examine whether linguistic formality in positive news disclosures, and engagement of social media users surrounding the disclosures (e.g., “likes” and “retweets”), affect investors' judgments about a firm and its management. Results suggest that, as predicted, investors are more sensitive to signals of audience engagement when disclosures use informal rather than formal language. Specifically, when associated with signals of high audience engagement, the use of informal language leads to greater willingness to invest than the use of formal language in a disclosure. However, also as predicted, the use of informal language hurts willingness to invest when associated with signals of low audience engagement. In two follow-up experiments, we investigate how news valence and linguistic formality are expected to affect the level of audience engagement in the first place, and we investigate whether managers strategically vary their use of linguistic formality based on characteristics of the setting. Overall, our results provide evidence on how firms might use social media disclosures to better connect with investors. This study contributes to the growing literature on linguistic attributes of disclosures, and the emerging literature investigating the consequences of issuing financial disclosures through social media.

中文翻译：

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语言形式和受众参与：投资者对社交媒体披露特征的反应*

随着公司越来越多地使用社交媒体向投资者提供信息披露，重要的是要了解与这些信息披露相关的特征是否会导致投资者的反应与通过更传统渠道提供的信息披露不同。在本文中，我们使用一个实验来检验正面新闻披露中的语言形式以及围绕披露的社交媒体用户的参与（例如，“喜欢”和“转发”）是否会影响投资者对公司及其管理层的判断。结果表明，正如预测的那样，当披露使用非正式而非正式语言时，投资者对受众参与的信号更加敏感。具体来说，当与观众参与度高的信号相关时，在披露中使用非正式语言比使用正式语言更愿意投资。然而，正如预测的那样，当与观众参与度低的信号相关时，使用非正式语言会损害投资意愿。在两个后续实验中，我们首先调查新闻效价和语言形式如何影响受众参与水平，并且我们调查管理者是否根据环境特征战略性地改变他们对语言形式的使用。总体而言，我们的结果提供了关于公司如何利用社交媒体披露来更好地与投资者建立联系的证据。这项研究有助于越来越多的关于披露语言属性的文献，