The Impacts of Social Media on Accounting and Auditing: Evidence from Greek Listed Firms

Abstract

Companies are increasingly using social media to communicate with stakeholders. During the last decade, social media started to become part and parcel of contemporary lifestyles. Thus, the main purpose of this research was the investigation of the impacts of social media on accounting and auditing by using companies’ social media posts. We performed quantitative research on an initial population of 183 companies being traded on the Athens Stock Exchange (ATHEX) for one fiscal year. We gathered data from corporate social media accounts and social media posts for the 2018 fiscal year (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn). We analyzed social media posts’ strategies, and we used the Kruskal–Wallis model and OLS regression model in order to analyze the relationships between social media accounts and posts and accounting and auditing. The findings from our research show that firms with active social media accounts and active impression management techniques on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn tend to achieve higher profits compared to companies that have inactive social media accounts. Additionally, the firm’s total liabilities are mainly positively related to its posts on specific social media accounts. In addition, cash, total assets and earnings before taxes affect social media posts to different degrees, depending on the post’s content and the category of social media as well. Taking into account the auditing variables, it is suggested that there is no relation among the given auditor’s opinion, the going concern assumption and the reviewed posts.