Social Media Ecosystem and Its Influence on Small Business Strategic Practices

The plethora of social media applications creates an ecosystem that can assist strategies for small business. However, the abundance of social media applications is attributed as a cause for confusion to business owners and executives making it difficult to conceive strategies for engaging effectively with social media. Following a practice theory, this paper uses an autoethnographic methodology to study how the social media ecosystem influences strategic practices of a small business. The study found that the social media ecosystem is crucial for enacting a strategy of a small business and that changes within the ecosystem influence the whole strategy. In addition, the study shows how context is interwoven with the social media ecosystem to affect the strategy of a small business. The study underscores the importance of strategizing practices for small business to develop agility that is necessary for developing and embedding digital transformation. Practically, the study highlights the significance and the need for developing countries to synchronize their soft infrastructure in order to help small businesses exploit the benefits of globalization during this era of social media

Enhancing organisational competitiveness via social media - a strategy as practice perspective

The affordances, popularity and pervasive use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have made these platforms attractive to organisations for enhancing their competitiveness and creating business value. Despite this apparent significance of social media for businesses, they are struggling with the development of a social media strategy as well as understanding the implications of social media on practice within their organisations. This paper explores how social media has become a tool for competitiveness and its influence on organisational strategy and practice. Using the 'strategy as practice' lens and guided by the interpretivist philosophy, this paper uses the empirical case of a telecom organisation in Tanzania. The findings show that social media is influencing competitiveness through imitation and product development. Also, the findings indicate how social media affects the practices within an organisation, consequently making the social media strategy an emergent phenomenon