Tweet to the Top? Social Media Personal Branding and Career Outcomes

This paper studies whether social media personal branding (PB) improves a job candidate’s labor market performance in the context of executive employment and compensation. We focus on executives employed by Standard & Poor’s 500 constituent companies from 2010 to 2013 and evaluate their PB on social media by analyzing their Twitter accounts. To disentangle the effect of PB from that of personality traits, we exploit a (positive) shock to the effectiveness of PB caused by a series of technology upgrades by Twitter. Estimations from a two-sided matching model suggest that social media PB benefits executive candidates in job markets. This paper contributes to the literature by initiating the study of the emerging phenomenon of social media PB and testing its effect on job market performance.