Factors Influencing Adoption of Social Media Strategies by SMMEs in South Africa

Social media is rapidly evolving as a solution to communicate with customers and business partners quickly. As an emerging phenomenon, social media has shown a lot of potential with its ability to transform the business environments from the traditional ways of business operations to more sophisticated ways. Businesses have always relied on processes of setting up strategies to infuse most of their initiatives for business sustainability and competitiveness as a standard practice. However, due to the rapid growth and use of social media among customers and individual employees, it is becoming a challenge for businesses to develop strategies which are consistent for the adoption and use of social media in order to meet the demands for customers and employees, particularly in SMMEs where there is lack of formal procedures and organizational structures. Recent literature reveals that there is limited research which focuses on social media strategies, frameworks, or models. Thus, this research explores the current literature of social media strategies and finds correlations with SMMEs to understand the factors that influence adoption of social media strategies among SMMEs. The study focuses on SMMEs which are incubated in South Africa to be sustainable and gradually become competitive and global players. Therefore, this research aims to ascertain factors that influence adoption of social media strategies by SMMEs in South Africa. Qualitative approach is adopted by means of reviewing the literature in the area of social media strategies and identifying the factors that are suitable for SMME businesses. The identified factors include: limited access to finance, entrepreneurial orientation; target audience; channel of choice; sharing, reputation; and relationships. Based on these factors, a proposed model including propositions for future studies is presented.