The Social media influence on the intellectual Capital growth of listed companies

The recent advent of new technologies takes a leading position in enhancing innovation and intellectual capital (IC) creation. Notably, social media play an important role in fostering intangible assets and in improving qualitative relationships among customers and organizations by promoting information sharing and opportunities to reach out to and engage with existing and prospective customers. Furthermore, social media interactions can contribute to shaping effective networks able to up to date employees in relation to the activities’ effectiveness undertaken to accomplish organizational goals. This can stimulate changes in employees’ educational background and in the organizational culture since social media can promote the acquisition, creation, and transfer of knowledge within and outside the enterprise. Therefore, the research questions are the following: (RQ1) Which are the principal components of social media as tool of IC disclosure for listed companies? (RQ2) Can the principal components of social media be correlated to the Value Added Intellectual Coefficient and be a tool of IC disclosure? An empirical analysis will be conducted to investigate the linear relationship between social media and listed enterprises’ IC. First, a principal component analyses (PCA) has been employed to identify the principal components for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. Second, the Pearson correlation has been applied to measure the linear correlation between the Value Added Intellectual Coefficient (VAIC) and the main components of social media. Specifically, the total population of the Italian firms quoted on the stock exchange (n=321) has been selected from AIDA database. The study tries to fill a gap in the IC literature by providing insights into the linear relationships between IC and social media with a focus on listed companies.