Social media in accounting research: A review and future research agenda

Abstract

In recent years, accounting scholars have shown growing interest in utilizing social media (SM) for research. Using a structured literature review of 86 articles, this study aims to reconcile insights from diverse literature to understand the current trends in SM accounting research and propose an agenda for future studies. Our findings reveal that SM accounting research is still at an early stage despite the increase of articles in recent years. In particular, we find that most studies focus on (publicly listed) corporate use of SM (mostly Twitter and Facebook) to disseminate financial and non-financial information in the North American and European regions. However, there is still a limited understanding of how SM interactions among various parties may push for greater transparency in different forms of organizations and in countries where stakeholder interests are less protected. While SM studies use system-oriented (such as institutional, legitimacy, and stakeholder theories) and economic-based theories, most studies only use SM as an empirical platform and rely on empirically developed arguments without reference to explicit theories. Finally, we identify common research themes and suggest promising avenues for future accounting research.