The purpose of this research is to study Social Media adoption by SMEs from business perspective. This research is targeting three main objectives. The first objective is to determine the current features and status of Social Media tools adoption in the Egyptian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in accordance with business purposes. The second objective is to gain a deeper understanding on the characteristics that drive or inhibit Social Media tools adoption and usage by the Egyptian small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The third objective is about measuring the effect of current adoption and the future intentions degree based on the decision toward the usage of Social Media tools on Egyptian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) business development efforts. Ten hypotheses were suggested to investigate which characteristics drive or inhibit Social Media tools adoption based on Innovation Diffusion Theory and to measure the impact of Social Media adoption on business development on the level of SMEs. The research adopted quantitative methodology and was conducted by arranging paper-based questionnaire collected from 150 social media actual and future adopters in Egyptian SMEs. The deductive logic was used to verify the proposed ten hypotheses. The data were analyzed using multiple regression (Stepwise method) by SPSS software.
The findings included firstly a general profile for Egyptian SMEs adopting the idea of Social Media use in Benha City. Secondly, the hypotheses testing proved that firstly, social media tools adoption on SMEs level is mainly supported by the innovation characteristics of business use of Social Media by SMEs owners in both maturity and intention levels. Secondly, Social Media adoption on both levels of maturity and intention has a great effect over business development efforts. To sum it all, the conducted study added knowledge to the indicated information gap in academic literature regarding the social media usage for business development from the SMEs perspective. It identified the main characteristics that shape Social Media adoption on both levels of Social Media Maturity and Social Media Intention and to what extend these levels affects business development efforts. |
