Does Social Media Marketing Really Work for Online SMEs?: An Empirical Study

Social media has become a major channel for firms’ marketing communications. Yet studies on the impact of social media marketing (SMM) have been limited to a few large firms. Motivated by the lack of understanding of the effectiveness of SMM for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), this study investigates the impact of online SMEs’ SMM messages on their sales performance through customer engagement. Fixed-effects regression analyses on weekly data from 288 online SMEs from the fashion retailing industry in China indicate that both customer endorsement and promotion information SMM messages positively influence customer engagement in the form of likes, shares, and comments. Additionally, customer engagement behaviors (likes and shares) lead to increased sales performance only if the SMEs verified their identity (a trust cue) with the social networking services and online e-commerce platform providers. Overall, the findings of this study highlight the crucial role of trust in SMEs’ SMM activities

Contemporary Micro-IT Capabilities and Organizational Performance: The Role of Online Customer Engagement

We theorize that the development of two contemporary social commerce-IT capabilities (social media and e-business technology) help to online engage customers to improve organizational performance. We test this theory by employing a secondary dataset on a sample of 100 small U.S. firms. The empirical analysis suggests that social media capability and e-business technology capability positively affect organizational performance through social and conventional online customer engagement. Research and managerial implications are discussed

Development Strategies for Privately Owned Fashion Boutiques

Abstract Many privately owned brick-and-mortar fashion boutiques in the United States fail to succeed beyond the first 5 years of business. The knowledge of the factors responsible for the decline in the survival rate of traditional or brick-and-mortar fashion boutiques may be essential to these entrepreneurs’ survival. Grounded in the general systems theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore strategies used by successful brick-and-mortar fashion boutique owners to negate the threat of online retailers. Data were collected through interviews with 5 brick-and-mortar fashion boutique owners, who operated businesses in the southeast region of the United States for more than 5 years, denoting success in fashion retailing. Secondary sources of data included secondoary data from the U. S. Small Business Administration, U. S. Census Bureau, and fashion industry reports. A thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Three themes emerged from the data analysis: the importance of marketing, fashion trends, and customer preference.. The outcomes of positive social change will expectedly result from the contribution to strategic knowledge generated from the study, in the formulation of innovative retail business strategies. The potential knowledge utilization of the study results may serve to increase the success rates of online fashion startups and positively influence improvement in the economic status and welfare of fashion business professionals in the community

National libraries' use of Facebook and Twitter and user engagement

This research investigated national libraries' use of Facebook and Twitter and the user responses to those activities. Data was collected directly from the Facebook and Twitter pages of three national libraries (Library of Congress between 30.01.18 and 24.04.18, National Library of Australia and National Library of Scotland both between 10.06.19 and 1.09.19) including the posts and user comments. Content and thematic analysis was performed on the posts to determine library behaviour and a developed toolkit utilising thematic discourse analysis was used to understand user responses. Libraries were found to post about library-centric topics such as collections, events and resources, and linked users to library controlled webspaces such as their websites or other social media. Images were used to either complement or enhance the information contained in posts, though no overall patterns emerged as the libraries varied slightly in their posting patterns. Two major differences were responses to other social media on Twitter that were not available on Facebook, and the NLS using more personable themes. The libraries also responded to users differently with LoC barely responding, and NLA and NLS liking and responding to comments. Users mostly responded to the content of posts, as well as having conversations in the NLA and NLS datasets. Common motivations for responding including liking the content, sharing the content with others, sharing relevant memories or content as well as gratitude and answering a question, with most motivations and comments positive. Response rates varied, with the NLS receiving the most comments on Twitter despite the smallest library size. The results aligned with existing research in other areas, and beyond the advice for practitioners to respond to users and use informal language, one of the main outputs of the research is a toolkit that can be used by others to gain deeper understanding of user engagements.This research investigated national libraries' use of Facebook and Twitter and the user responses to those activities. Data was collected directly from the Facebook and Twitter pages of three national libraries (Library of Congress between 30.01.18 and 24.04.18, National Library of Australia and National Library of Scotland both between 10.06.19 and 1.09.19) including the posts and user comments. Content and thematic analysis was performed on the posts to determine library behaviour and a developed toolkit utilising thematic discourse analysis was used to understand user responses. Libraries were found to post about library-centric topics such as collections, events and resources, and linked users to library controlled webspaces such as their websites or other social media. Images were used to either complement or enhance the information contained in posts, though no overall patterns emerged as the libraries varied slightly in their posting patterns. Two major differences were responses to other social media on Twitter that were not available on Facebook, and the NLS using more personable themes. The libraries also responded to users differently with LoC barely responding, and NLA and NLS liking and responding to comments. Users mostly responded to the content of posts, as well as having conversations in the NLA and NLS datasets. Common motivations for responding including liking the content, sharing the content with others, sharing relevant memories or content as well as gratitude and answering a question, with most motivations and comments positive. Response rates varied, with the NLS receiving the most comments on Twitter despite the smallest library size. The results aligned with existing research in other areas, and beyond the advice for practitioners to respond to users and use informal language, one of the main outputs of the research is a toolkit that can be used by others to gain deeper understanding of user engagements

Factors affecting social media use by entrepreneurs and the impact of this use on the opportunity recognition process

Social media is believed to play an essential role in supporting entrepreneurial business and opportunity recognition. However, little is known about the factors that drive social media use and how social media capabilities impact entrepreneurial opportunity recognition. In exploring the role of social media to understand the potential role of social media use on entrepreneurial opportunity recognition, the study was based on the Technological-Organization-Environmental (TOE) and the Opportunity Recognition Frameworks. A mixedmethod study was conducted with data collected from a developed economy (Australia) and a developing country (Nigeria). An initial research model was developed based on the extant review of literature on social media use and entrepreneur opportunity recognition. Firstly, qualitative data were collected via interviews with 14 entrepreneurs, which identified eight factors under four broad categories (technology, environment, individual and social media platform factors) that influence entrepreneur social media use. Also, five social media capabilities were identified (networking, searching, observing, experimenting, and social media data analytics) to drive entrepreneurial opportunity recognition. Comparing the qualitative data with themes developed from published literature, the initial research model was revised. In the second stage, a survey of 568 entrepreneurs was used to validate the model and its associated relationships. The analysis suggests that four general factors influence social media use; platform perception, absorptive capacity, platform abuse and external pressure. In addition, the use of social media was found to influence opportunity recognition through four of the five identified capabilities: searching, observing, experimenting, and data analytics. However, the findings indicate differences on how social media capability drives opportunity recognition amongst entrepreneur in Australia and Nigeria, which can be explained based on their individualist and collectivist culture respectively. Interestingly, the multi-group analysis revealed that the influence of social media capabilities on opportunity recognition might vary depending on the entrepreneur's gender and the age of their business. The theoretical contribution and practical implications of the findings to social media companies, entrepreneurs, and policymakers were discussed. The study limitation includes being a cross sectional study, focusing on small businesses and evaluating two countries