Online equity markets have significantly changed the dynamics of connecting angels and individual equity investors to new ventures that seek early-stage capital. However, for those early-stage investors, information pointing to the success of business-to-business (B2B) new ventures (B2BNVs) is scattered and disconnected. This paper focuses on social media narratives (SMNs) as a source of insight for such investors and proposes that predicting a B2BNV’s likelihood of success requires a comparative view, i.e., a comparison of its SMNs with those of its competitors and customers. We expect that higher (lower) lingual similarity between the SMNs of an early-stage B2BNV and those of its prospective customers (competitors) predict its success. Using a longitudinal panel of 574 B2BNVs resulting in more than 2,700 venture-round observations, we find that a comparative view of a venture’s SMNs can give early-stage investors reliable predictions about the B2BNV’s ability to manage its market presence and its success in later stages. Our models show that a comparative view of SMNs increases the accuracy of predicting a B2BNV’s later-stage fundraising success by an average of 15%. Furthermore, predictive models can reliably point to a successful market presence in later stages, including the landing of customers, the winning of awards and competitions, the receiving of endorsements, the generating of revenue, and the successful patenting of products. Our study contributes to existing literature that focuses on the business impacts of social media by demonstrating the usefulness of comparative linguistics in social media analytics, i.e., comparing the firm’s social media communications to those of its competitors and business customers in the prediction of the entrepreneurial firm’s success.

中文翻译：

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新企业的早期言论是否预示着筹款？社交媒体叙事的比较观点

在线股票市场显着改变了将天使和个人股权投资者与寻求早期资本的新企业联系起来的动力。然而，对于那些早期投资者而言，指向企业对企业 (B2B) 新企业 (B2BNV) 成功的信息是分散且不连贯的。本文侧重于将社交媒体叙述 (SMN) 作为此类投资者的洞察力来源，并提出预测 B2BNV 成功的可能性需要比较的观点，即，将其 SMN 与其竞争对手和客户的 SMN 进行比较。我们预计早期 B2BNV 的 SMN 与其潜在客户（竞争对手）的 SMN 之间较高（较低）的语言相似性预示着它的成功。使用 574 个 B2BNV 的纵向面板，产生超过 2,700 个风险投资轮观察，我们发现，对一家企业的 SMN 进行比较可以为早期投资者提供有关 B2BNV 管理其市场存在的能力及其在后期阶段取得成功的可靠预测。我们的模型表明，SMN 的比较视图将预测 B2BNV 后期筹款成功的准确性平均提高了 15%。此外，预测模型可以可靠地指出后期阶段的成功市场存在，包括客户的登陆、获奖和竞赛的获胜、获得认可、产生收入以及成功申请产品专利。我们的研究通过展示比较语言学在社交媒体分析中的有用性，为关注社交媒体业务影响的现有文献做出了贡献，即，