Factors Influencing Retail SMEs Adoption of Social Media for Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is at the forefront to ensure survival of digital commerce businesses. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are continually encouraged to adopt digital commerce and place themselves in line with competing big enterprises. In the South African SMEs retail industry, digital commerce has not been fully utilized to its full potential. Specifically, SMEs in this industry have not fully adopted social media as a digital marketing platform. The objective of the study was to investigate factors influencing the adoption of social media as a digital marketing platform by SMEs in the retail sector. The study adopted a qualitative systematic literature review approach to understand factors affecting adoption of social media for digital marketing by SMEs. The study used TOE framework as a lens to understand the factors affecting adoption of digital marketing by SMEs. The study results showed that the adoption of social media was influenced by technological factors, organizational factors, and environmental factors. The study revealed that although efforts have been made to study social media adoption within retail SMEs; there are still areas that can be further investigated. The study contributed to our knowledge on the factors influencing the adoption of social media platforms for digital marketing by retail SMEs. The results of the study are also important to SMEs as they influence decision making in digital marketing.