Adoption and Use of Social Media in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

Meske Christian, Stieglitz Stefan

Abstract
In recent years, social media have been increasingly adopted in enterprises. Enterprises use social media as an additional way to get in contact with their customers and support internal communication and collaboration. However, little research is devoted to the adoption and internal usage of social media in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which are of high social and economic importance. The purpose of this paper is to examine the adoption, usage, and benefits of social media in SMEs as well as potential concerns that may prevent a wider adoption of social media in SMEs. Therefore, a survey of decision-makers in German SMEs was conducted. Findings based on 190 responses indicate that SMEs started to use internal social media (e.g., wikis, blogs) in order to support collaboration among employees and to improve knowledge management. However, SMEs still face problems to manage adoption and to identify relevant business values. Based on our results, we derive several implications for SMEs, in particular how to overcome the obstacles to a wider adoption of social media.

Keywords
social media; SME; adoption; usage; LSE; internal; unternehmensintern