“So, 99.95 percent of the change could be explained by the change in fan counts,” he says. In other words, the overwhelming majority of the change in a company’s stock price correlated with the Facebook likes that day or that period. It’s not that Facebook likes caused shares to rise or fall, but the admiration a company gets on social media seems to be a good clue about stock market performance.
So the two are related, not because they impact each other but because both factors tend to swim in the same direction at the same time.
This is different than, though there are certainly similarities, the question of what a social media fan – or the interactions and engagement of those fans – are worth in a very clear monetary sense. That’s a question that is going to vary from program to program, though Eventbrite has been making some news by releasing their findings on that issue.
There may not be a way to clearly track the impact of social network activity to stock price other than to observe both things and look for points where they track along similar lines. But there are a number of ways to see what sort of financial impact online activity is having on a clearly defined action like sales, so it’s important to put those trackers in place.
