The Neglected Cohort : The Impact of Silent Majority in Social Media on Stock Returns

Prior studies have mostly analyzed users of social media as a whole, however, different user cohorts have different behavior characteristics and may have different effects. We divide users in social media into silent majority and vocal minority based on their posting behavior. Our results show that the investor sentiment of silent majority has a greater impact on stock returns than that of vocal minority and all users. In addition, we also explore the mechanism that generates differences in the effects of different user cohorts and find that the opinion distance effect weakens the impact of investor sentiment on stock returns