Let the user speak: Is feedback on Facebook a source of firms’ innovation?

Social media open up new possibilities for firms to exploit information from various external sources. Does this help become more innovative? Combining firm-level survey data with firms’ Facebook pages, we study the role that and users’ activities on play in innovation process. We find adoption of a page as well feedback users are positively significantly related product innovations. Our results withstand large set robustness checks, including estimations take potential endogeneity use unobserved heterogeneity into account. Analyzing content firm posts user comments reveals is only correlated innovations if actively participate discussion, especially when engagement above-average comes both sides.