A Framework for Social Media Adoption in Business

Abstract

Although considerable researches are dealing with the areas of social media analytics, its applications in business, and emerging technologies for big data analytics as isolated areas, there was lack of comprehensive works that considers both social media use in business and providing frameworks or models for such use. Extant frameworks have often overlooks considering suitability of social media for particular business perspectives, performance perspectives, stakeholders, factors that affect adoption process, policies that govern the use and most importantly the existence of the convenient performance measurement system. The research objectives developing a conceptual framework for adopting social media in the business, so that it assist businesses in identifying needs of stakeholders and/ or contributions expected from them, in addition to properly identifying and tracking targeted performance indicators. This research is following both qualitative and quantitative methods to survey seven local businesses investigating extant frameworks and studies. Then, the extracted variables from data analysis and literature are used for developing the solution framework, and then validated through two use cases. Findings shows that social media is likely to succeed in some business areas and get slower success in others, also it shows direct relationship between right identification and announcement of performance indicators from one side and perceiving benefits of social media use. Moreover, it is clear that there is a need for involving actors from related business units in setting up measurements system with clear definition of their responsibilities in adoption process. Obtained results couldn’t be totally generalized for businesses worldwide since the primary data had been collected from businesses in Sudan where ICT infusion and diffusion levels are relatively low. Moreover, the responses had been taken once, which gives a chance for changes in responses over time as a result of changes surrounding factors and business effort to support the adoption of social media. Use cases, too, had been developed to validate certain requirements in the developed framework.