Payday Loan Marketing in Social Media Networks

The payday lending industry has grown dramatically over the past two decades, with lenders increasingly marketing their products on the Internet. However, little is known about payday loan (PDL) marketing through social media networks. Our study is the first to report the PDL promotions on Twitter. Out of 23,276 tweets related to PDLs from June 29, 2015 to October 2, 2015, 71% were commercial tweets, most of which came from a small percentage of users. The overall impact to the general public was large and we observed a range of opinions in our sentiment analysis. Commercial tweets had an average sentiment score of 34.9 while noncommercial had a total average sentiment score of 50.7. Commercial tweets were more concentrated in states with restrictive or hybrid regulations on PDL. Our findings provide evidence for enhancing online PDL regulations and using social media data for real-time monitoring of PDL lending.