Social Media and Job Market Success: A Field Experiment on Twitter

Abstract

To examine the impact of social media promotion of job market papers on job outcomes, we conduct a field experiment on Twitter (now X). Specifically, we examine how having a prominent economist quote-tweet a job market paper in the field of economics impacts paper visibility and candidate job market outcomes. Our results show that papers assigned to be quote-tweeted in our experiment receive 442% more views and 303% more likes than those assigned to the control condition. We further find that those in the quote-tweet treatment receive one additional flyout and that the women in the treatment group receive 0.9 more job offers. These findings suggest that social media promotion can improve the visibility and success of job market candidates, especially for underrepresented groups in economics such as women.

Keywords: social media, academic job market, field experiment

JEL Classification: D47, C78, C92, D82