Investigating SMEs' use of social media in developing, enhancing and maintaining customer relationships

Abstract

Social media has become an active academic research area (Dong et el, 2017). Social media has become increasingly popular in recent years (Garrido-Moreno et al, 2018) and led to a change in how entrepreneurs perform their day-to-day activities change (Olanrewaju et al, 2020). The ability to enter into a two-way dialogue with customers through social media enables SMEs to develop closer bonds with their customers (Skoumpopoulou et al, 2014). The collaborative nature of such dialogue can provide SMEs with access to a wider pool of ideas from which the next big idea, service or product may potentially emerge. Indeed, there is growing evidence that businesses engaging in social media gain value and a competitive advantage (Holsapple et al, 2018).

Salam et al (2019) note that there is a need for investigation of relationship marketing effects on SME performance and the moderating effect of social media due to the shortage of research in this area, particularly from the SME perspective (Hassan et al, 2015). Indeed, despite social media being all about people and ‘relationships’ (McCann and Barlow, 2015), Dutot and Bergon (2016) note that most of the literature on social media has focused on the end user factors of social media strategy (Weinberg and Pehlivan, 2011) and measurement (Dutot, 2013) rather than a relational perspective. It is therefore important to understand how SMEs are using these platforms for this purpose and determine the factors that impact SMEs’ use of social media when developing, enhancing and maintaining customer relationships.

Adapting Berry’s (1983, 2002) concept of relationship marketing, this study used the theoretical framework of ‘develop, enhance and maintain’ to examine the factors impacting SMEs’ use of social media in their customer relationships. It used a two-stage mixed methods viii approach to achieve the research objectives. In Phase 1, the key issues emerging from an extensive review of literature were used as the basis of exploring SMEs’ use of social media when developing, enhancing and maintaining their customer relationships. The issues emerging from Phase 1 were modelled with those emerging from the literature to create an empirically-grounded research model of factors impacting SMEs’ use of social media in their customer relationships. The factors within the empirically-grounded research model was tested in Phase 2 using a self-reported questionnaire that was delivered online.

The empirical data collected found that none of the modelled factors had an impact on SMEs’ use of social media when developing, enhancing and maintaining customer relationships. The data did however reveal that two-way interactions and immersive gamification techniques were being used by SME owner/managers when engaging customers on social media during the relationship enhancement stage of the customer relationship. The data also revealed that authenticity and credibility were important issues for SMEs when building trust with customers on social media and maintaining relationships with them. As such, this is the key contribution that this thesis makes to extant knowledge and should be considered new knowledge. Going forward, these are focus areas that SMEs should place a greater emphasis on when using social media to develop, enhance and maintain customer relationships. ix

Date of Award	Apr 2020
Original language	English
Supervisor	Mark Durkin (Supervisor), Pauric Mc Gowan (Supervisor) & Aodheen McCartan (Supervisor)