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



Publication type
Research article in proceedings (conference)

Peer reviewed
Yes

Publication status
Published

Year
2013

Conference
Practice-driven Research on Enterprise Transformation (PRET)

Venue
Utrecht, Netherlands

Book title
Practice-Driven Research on Enterprise Transformation

Editor
Harmsen Frank, Proper Hendrik

Pages range
61-75

Volume
151

Title of series
Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing

Publisher
Springer

Place
Berlin

Language
English