Title: SMEs - social media marketing performance

Authors: Hilary Berger; Christopher Thomas

Addresses: Cardiff School of Management, Cardiff Metropolitan University, Cardiff CF5 2YB, UK ' Cardiff School of Management, Cardiff Metropolitan University, Cardiff CF5 2YB, UK

Abstract: In today's hyper-connected globalised world, social media and online customer interactions are changing the way companies do business from the outside in. Our investigation concerns the monitoring of social media performance within SMEs and more particularly within Wales. The continuous expansion of social media (marketing) and the concomitant growth of innovative new platforms have driven businesses to embrace new strategies presenting new challenges for current (and future) practice. This has led to a sustained need for organisations to engage in performance monitoring of social media. However, we found that in practice the timing of implementation of social media marketing into an SME is not the most important factor but that focus is concentrated on the perceived costs and time elements involved. Thus, for SMEs performance monitoring is not always an automatic consideration.

Keywords: SMEs; social media marketing; social media monitoring; Web 2.0; Wales; performance monitoring; small and medium-sized enterprises.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWET.2016.079037

International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology, 2016 Vol.11 No.3, pp.215 - 232

Published online: 09 Sep 2016 *

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