Stock market reaction: the impact of social media

The recent massive growth volume of “big data” and the rise of user-authored content (e.g weblogs, Twitter, Facebook) and use of search engines (e.g Google, Wikipedia) resulting from human interaction with the Web 2.0 tools may offer a new insights on the behavior of market players in periods of large market movements. By analyzing the social media sentiment extracted from economic blogs’ posts, Google and Wikipedia query volumes for search terms related to financial crisis, it was found that this data can have a statistically significant impact on financial markets indicators. The results suggest that the combination of widespread behavioral data sets offers can be a useful tool to better understand collective human behavior.