Determinants of SME’s Social Media Marketing Adoption: Competitive Industry as a Moderator

Abstract

In light of the growing role of social media marketing in the success of businesses and its low adoption rate among small and medium enterprises (SMEs), this study aims to identify determinants of SMEs’ social media marketing adoption by considering the competitive industry as a moderator. Data were collected from 214 SMEs in Malaysia. Unlike extant literature, this study proposed a dual-stage analysis involving partial least squares (PLS) technique and artificial intelligence named deep artificial neural network (ANN). The application of deep ANN architecture is used to predict 91% of accuracy for the proposed model. The results showed that perceived relative advantage, perceived cost, top management support, perceived competitor pressure, and perceived vendor pressure have a significant impact on social media marketing adoption. Furthermore, the competitive industry moderates the effects of competitive pressure and customer pressure on social media marketing adoption. The results of the study extend the literature on social media marketing by illustrating the influence of technological, organizational, and environmental (TOE) factors on social media marketing adoption among SMEs concerning the extent of industry competition. The results of the study enable policymakers and managers of SMEs to understand the factors that influence social media marketing adoption in both competitive and non-competitive industries and invest effectively in digital marketing.

People’s expectations and experiences of big data collection in the Saudi context

“…For the significance of hypothesized relationships in the proposed model, researchers in this study have used PLS-SEM software. PLS-SEM has been adopted due to several reasons, such as it can test complex models ( Ali Abbasi et al, 2022 ; Ashaari et al, 2021 ; Henseler, Ringle & Sarstedt, 2015 ; Chin, Marcolin & Newsted, 2003 ), does not involve normality, small sample size, and able to work without distributional assumptions ( Abbasi et al, 2021 ). Along with symmetrical analytical tools (PLS-SEM) to explore the combinations of causal factors (causal complexities of four factors) leading to the outcome (people autonomy), asymmetrical modelling was performed by using fsQCA ( Ragin, 2008 ).…”

Institutional isomorphism and social media adoption – a study within the microenterprise context

“…In the past decade, the use of partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) has attracted numerous interests and especially in investigations that are at the interface of digital adoption and organizational research (Abbasi et al, 2022;Alziady and Enayah, 2019;Bharati et al, 2014;Foltean et al, 2019;Li and Wang, 2018;Vatanasakdakul et al, 2020), hence a reason to use PLS-SEM since it makes this study more comparable to others. Moreover, because this work is based on in-sample prediction, in addition to the extension of the institutional theory to a context that has never been before investigated and coupled with the fact that the adoption of social media is a more recent phenomenon, the use of PLS-SEM is and social media adoption analytically valid.…”

“…While there is a growing recognition of the positive role that social media can play in the firm (Abbasi et al, 2022;Eid et al, 2019), social media adoption by the small-sized firm, as compared to large firms, remains relatively low till date (Namankani et al, 2016;Deloitte Touche Tohmastum, 2017;Statista, 2021a). For instance, a business survey conducted in the European Union (EU) revealed that only 48% of small firms use social media in the EU (Statista, 2021a), while in Australia and New Zealand it was found that only one in five small firms regularly use social media to engage with consumers (Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, 2017).…”

“…While there is a growing recognition of the positive role that social media can play in the firm (Abbasi et al. , 2022; Eid et al.…”

Customer retention through service quality and satisfaction: using hybrid SEM-neural network analysis approach

“…Satisfying and retaining the customer is always challenging, as customer retention has become more challenging in the E-Comm ( Abbasi et al., 2022 ). Personal mobile devices offer the facility to contact people and use internet services on the go for multiple activities ( Jay and Zhang, 2016 ).…”