Customer Attitude from Social Media, Customer Satisfaction Index, and Firm Value

Social media has emerged as a key source of understanding customer satisfaction, which is used by investors in their investment decision. Nonetheless, whether and how social media metrics on customer attitude toward the company has not been thoroughly examined. This study develops a new index of customer satisfaction by using sentiment and content analyses of customer-generated social media content. Across multiple social media platforms, we found that positive testimonials (i.e., “Likes” from Facebook) and positive blogs have statistically positive associations with customer satisfaction, while customer complaints (from Facebook), negative blogs, and negative tweets are negatively associated with it by using a semiparametric model. Furthermore, we found that the proposed customer satisfaction index based on social media metrics is positively and statistically associated with firm's market performance. In addition, we suggest that the new social media metrics about customer attitude toward the company would strongly complement existing customer satisfaction index such as ACSI