Making the Right Impression for Corporate Reputation: Analyzing Impression Management of Financial Institutions in Social Media

The concept of corporate reputation reflects the standing of a firm based on the public perception. Firms with high corporate reputation are better able to sustain superior performance. During the financial crisis, the corporate reputation of financial institutions has decreased resulting in a bad perception of the financial sector by the public. However, improving their corporate reputation is of major importance for financial institutions as they are heavily dependent on the trust of the market participants. Thus, managing the public perception about a financial institution is of critical importance. Therefore, firms can deploy organizational impression management tactics to influence how the public perceives them. In this research, we obtained data from 54 corporate Twitter accounts of 36 financial institutions broadcasting more than 21,000 messages between October 2012 and June 2013 to the public. Thereby, we combine two former separately discussed theories in a single research approach and examine which organizational impression management tactics can be identified based on the social media messages regarding corporate reputation. The results indicate that based on the different dimensions of corporate reputation financial institutions deploy different organizational impression management tactics in social media to manage their reputation.