How Social Media Predicts News Viewership - The Moderating Role of News Theme Prominence

This paper explores the predictive power of social media with respect to news viewership in a business context. Using 0.7 million pieces of stock market news and 37.3 million stocks-related microblogs in 2013, we find that this power of social media is stronger for low prominence news themes (e.g., news about Blue Apron) than for high-prominence news themes (e.g., news about Microsoft). Specifically, the intensity of social media sentiment (either positive or negative) and social media volume are positively associated with news viewership; social media credibility is negatively associated with news viewership. More importantly, the impacts of social media sentiment, positive sentiment social media volume and social media credibility are all stronger for low-prominence news themes. Our findings quantify the power of the crowd in shaping news narratives. Especially, our findings describe how the opinions of the crowd can build up the popularity of non-elite news themes.