CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON THE DEVELOPMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY OF SMES IN LAGOS STATE

CHAPTER TWO

LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 INTRODUCTION

Our focus in this chapter is to critically examine relevant literature that would assist in explaining the research problem and furthermore recognize the efforts of scholars who had previously contributed immensely to similar research. The chapter intends to deepen the understanding of the study and close the perceived gaps.

2.2 CONCEPTUAL FRAME WORK

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media are computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks Users typically access social media services via web-based technologies on desktop computers, and laptops, or download services that offer social media functionality to their mobile devices (e.g., smartphones and tablet computers). When engaging with these services, users can create highly interactive platforms through which individuals, communities and organizations can share, cocreate, discuss, and modify user-generated content or pre-made content posted online. They introduce substantial and pervasive changes to communication between businesses, organizations, communities and individuals. Social media changes the way individuals and large organizations communicate. These changes are the focus of the emerging field of technoself studies. Social media differ from paper-based media (e.g., magazines and newspapers) or traditional electronic media such as TV broadcasting in many ways, including quality, reach, frequency, interactivity, usability, immediacy, and permanence. Social media operate in a dialogic transmission system (many sources to many receivers). This is in contrast to traditional media which operates under a monologic transmission model (one source to many receivers), such as a paper newspaper which is delivered to many subscribers or a radio station which broadcasts the same programs to an entire city. Some of the most popular social media websites are Baidu Tieba, Facebook (and its associated Facebook Messenger), Gab, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, Tumblr, Twitter, Viber, VK, WeChat, Weibo, What sApp, Wikia, and YouTube.

EVOLUTION OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media have evolved through Web 2.0, a term coined to describe a new wave of Internet innovation that enables users to publish and exchange content online Kaplan and Haenlein (cited in Eun 2011:6). Social media encompass a wide range of electronic forums, including blogs, microblogs (e.g., Twitter), social networking sites (e.g., Facebook), creative work-sharing sites (e.g., YouTube), business networking sites (e.g., LinkedIn), collaborative websites (e.g., Wikipedia), and virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life). Among these social media, social networks and microblogs are the most popular, accounting for 22.7% of all time spent online in the United States ACNielsen (cited in Eun 2011). According to Dominick (2009) Web 2.0 is the idea of a second generation Internet that is highly participatory, allowing users to improve it as they use it. Social media contents are primarily written and published by their users and not owners or employees of the site. For instance, most adverts, videos and pictures on Facebook and Twitter are uploaded by visitors of the sites. Jenkins et. al (cited in Stagno: 2) observe that Web 2.0 has been growing tremendously as it facilitates the production and dissemination of information, allows for the involvements in participatory culture to share individual expressions or creations and bring people with similar interests and goals to connect with each other on blogs, social networking sites and others. Few years ago, websites were quite static and passive. There was no much interaction going on as they were mostly corporate websites. The only way an individual could participate online was to send an email or form to the owners or web master of the website and hope that they would get back to him. This type of arrangement was called Web 1.0, referred to as “first generation Web where users generally consumed content. The audience went to web pages and looked at content provided by the website owner” Dominick (2009:283). But today, users have become producers which mean that they simultaneously consume and produce information (Bruns, cited in Stagno 2010).

Facebook was created by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 alongside his roommates and fellow computer science classmates Eduardo Saverin, Austin Maskovitz and Chris Hughes at Harvard University in the U.S (Locke cited in Nnaane 2011). Initially, Facebook membership was restricted to Harvard students but later extended to other colleges in Boston and Stanford University all in the U.S. “Since 2006, Facebook has expanded beyond Harvard to other 24 schools, corporations, businesses and any user across the world” (Dunay & Krueger 2010). Zuckerberg, cited in (Nweze, 2009) explains that advertising on Facebook is an opportunity for companies to reach their exact audience and connect real customers to their business. Facebook allow users to connect and share information in a variety of ways. Facebook allow users to post photos, videos and customize their profile content.

Facebook has added a number of features over the past few years, including instant messaging/chat and apps (and their developer platform).Users communicate with one another through different methods, for instance, private messaging as well as writing on another user’s wall. Facebook pages are online location for businesses, organisations, public figures, entertainers, professionals of all types and individuals with the intention of marketing themselves to the Facebook community. Facebook Pages provide a powerful set of online tools for engaging with customers (or, as they are called in Facebook, fans). Every day, 3.5 million people become fans of a Facebook Page.

According to eMetric’s February 2009 Facebook Usage Metrics Worldwide Study, although popular consumer brands enjoy large installed fan bases, smaller brands, business-to-business (B2B) companies, consultants, and personalities can also build a loyal following by using Facebook Page (Dunay & Krueger 2010). He notes further that if Facebook were a country, it would be the sixth most populated nation in the world. This is because the site has grown to be perhaps the most popular all over the world with a user base of over 660 million (Amaefule 2011). The number of users continues to grow steadily.

Tyler (2010) explains that there are currently 1.7 billion Internet users worldwide, almost 57% of them have joined a social network, 66% of all Internet users visit social networks, Facebook is used more than 80 million hours daily and that close to 15million photos, wall posts, links, news, notes etc. are shared on Facebook every day. According to Idaresit (cited in Ofose, 2010) about 39.6 percent of all Internet traffic from Africa is from Nigeria and 29.8 percent of the population access the Internet. As at 2009, there were 30 million Nigerians on Facebook. Of this figure, 67% were males while 33% were females. These figures have changed since then. Lagos alone now has about two million subscribers to Facebook (Ogunbayo, 2011). Supporting the above, Solaja and Odiaka (2010) state that “such a large population naturally offers a good basis for the adoption of the platforms for marketing purposes”. Facebook offers targeted communication initiative to select customers groups for product development as well as service enhancement and also be able to engage their customers and non-customers on platforms they are comfortable with while recovery real-time feedback on what they have to say about their brand, products and services (Wmworia 2010).

Twitter as a social media platform was also lunched in 2006 and founded by Dorsey Jack, Biz Stone and Evan Williams as a free micro blogging social network that enables users to post short messages known as tweets that could be viewed by other subscribers, more commonly referred to as followers. Tweets of not more than 140 characters can be sent from and received by almost any kind of electronic equipment, including desktop computers, laptops, Black Berrys, iphones, and other mobile devices (Farhi 2009). According to D’Monte (cited in Nnaane 2011:16) Twitter has gained popularity worldwide and is estimated to have 200 million users, generating 65 million tweets a day and handling over 800,000 search queries a day. Message brevity, in contrast with lengthy e-mail marketing messages, has been hailed as an asset of microblogs; which 26 enables consumers to browse a large amount of updates efficiently (Zhao and Rosson, 2009). Aided by increases in smart phone sales and the continued rollout of Internet and mobile network infrastructure, Twitter is poised for even more growth (Wauters, 2010). Users broadcast messages to the masses, without visiting a particular person's profile to do so. By following other users, people automatically receive messages on their own Twitter home pages tweeted by those whom they are following. Even though some Twitter accounts are kept private, and some users require that they offer approval to people who wish to follow them, messages exchanged on this microblog are public by default, thus everyone can read and comment on a Twitter message (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). Chiang (2011) explains that visitors increased by 1,382, to 7 million in February 2009, up from 475,000 in February 2008, “making it the fastest growing social media site for that month” (McGiboney, 2009).

SMALL BUSINESS

Small businesses are privately owned corporations, partnerships, or sole proprietorships which have fewer employees and/or less annual revenue than a regular-sized business or corporation(wikipedia). Businesses are defined as "small" in terms of being able to apply for government support and qualify for preferential tax policy varies depending on the country and industry. Small businesses range from fifteen employees under the AustralianFair Work Act 2009, fifty employees according to the definition used by the European Union, and fewer than five hundred employees to qualify for many U.S. Small Business Administration programs. While small businesses can also be classified according to other methods, such as annual revenues, shipments, sales, assets, or by annual gross or net revenue or net profits, the number of employees is one of the most widely used measures(Investopedia).

Small businesses in many countries include service or retail operations such as convenience-stores, Small grocery stores, bakeries or delicatessens, hairdressers or tradespeople (e.g., carpenters, electricians), restaurants, guest houses, photographers, very small-scale manufacturing, and Internet-related businesses such as web design and computer programming. Some professionals operate as small businesses, such as lawyers, accountants, dentists, and medical doctors (although these professionals can also work for large organizations or companies).

Nappi and Vora (1981) determined that the definition of small businesses fluctuated from state to state suggestions that there needed to be a basic set of criteria such as number of employees or annual income, used nationally to create standards by which government agencies could identify small businesses. This opened the door for more effort in the definition

The next attempt to provide a definition was presented by Ang (1991) who stated that small business is defined as private, undiversified, lacking limited liability, and entrepreneurial. In this definition, the company would not be led by a management team rather it would be a sole proprietor or general partnership with room to grow. An additional attempt to define small business was presented by Drinan (1995) stating that the number of employees should be less than 100 in manufacturing and less than 20 in construction or service industries. There is little rationale for this definition. Osteryoung, Newman, and Davies (1997) presented a new definition of small business stating that a small business must meet three criteria, “(a) it must be measurable and observable, (b) it must be congruent with the market system, and (c) it must be meaningful “(Osteryoung, Newman, & Davies, 1997, p. 4). The authors also supported the idea that a small business should not be publicly traded and would be personally guaranteed by the company owner. In 2001 Valker, Phillips, and Anderson attempted to provide yet another definition of small business as any company that is represented by the “degree of development and access to capital” (p. 11). Essentially, this means that a small business has limited access to funding beyond personal savings, family, and local banks.

SOCIAL MEDIA AND SMALL BUSINESS

social Media Is Changing the Traditional methods of Presence.The traditional techniques of marketing using print and electronic media along with Internet marketing and lead generation were used to drive traffic to a business and its website. As search engine algorithms evolve, website owners have to stay on their toes to make sure their website is constantly updated with relevant and current information to prevent being devalued in search results(Shea B 2016). Today, social media like, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and YouTube channels are being seen as sites in their own right to mark the presence. Social Media Allows Businesses to Crowd-source IdeasBefore you launch a new product or service, one would like to have some ideas about what people think about it. So by engaging with prospects and customers via social media, one can actually ask the fans and followers what colors they prefer or what types of features they want(Abu B & Irshad A.2012). Thus one can involve consumers in valuable free market research, by asking their opinions and can help establish credibility by showing that their opinions matter. After seeing their ideas becoming a reality, business has more than likely just increased their customer base. Social Media Allows to Keep An Eye On Competition Businesses are changing marketing strategies based on information they find in social media feeds from their competitors. By keeping an eye on competitors, their strengths and weaknesses can determine their marketing efforts. This gathered information helps to implement things that might be needed to improve such as social media campaigns, contests, giveaways or types of content the followers may be responding to the most. Social Media Allows Business to Be More TransparentThe process of taking a prospect to the point of becoming a customer has slowed down somewhat due to consumers‟ awareness. People want to buy from those companies who have established credibility and who seem to be totally transparent in their advertising campaigns. Social media is changing peoples‟ opinions of businesses. By providing messages that are open, transparent, and helpful, social audiences will learn that your business cares about its customers and potential customers. One can position their company as a valuable resource by simply sharing information like advice, tips, or just answering questions about the industry.

Social Media Marketing

"Social media are web-based services that allow individuals, communities, and organizations to collaborate, connect, interact, and build communities by enabling them to create, co-create, modify, share and engage with user-generated content that is easily accessible" as explained by Sloan & Quan-Haase (2017, p. 17). In addition, this content can be distributed through many social platforms in several kinds of forms including blogs, discussion forums, images, films, etc. Social Media networks have become the most influential phenomenon in communication in recent decades (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). In them, the interaction between a community is allowed and facilitated, which helps build trust and a “common feeling” among their members (Leimeister, Sidiras, & Krcmar, 2006). It offers people new ways to build and maintain social networks, create relationships, share information, create and edit content, or even participate in social movements; all through a virtual platform (Lorenzo-Romero, Constantinides, & Alarcóndel-Amo, 2011). This interaction between its members can include text, images, audio, videos or any other type of communication format (Ryan & Jones, 2009, p. 152). According to Fuchs (2008, p. 239-240), some of the most important characteristics of “virtual communities” in social media are their continuous voluntary interaction between its members, their shared interests and topics, the existence of formal and informal conventions, and the global dimension and speed with which relationships develop. Currently, social media platforms are considered of great importance, both for individuals and for companies; since they help maintain existing social ties and encourage the development of new connections between users (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). These platforms have become an interactive medium that allows the development of direct and personalized communication between the company and clients as well; without geographical or temporary limitations. In addition, social media networks make possible different types of interactions with customers; such as advertising and information, presales, order configuration, purchases, after-sales services, etc (Kim, & Ko, 2012). As the direction of communication between the company and customers is bidirectional, businesses can take advantage of these social media marketing tools to build relationships with their clients in a more direct, effective, and controllable way (Sashi, 2012).

Social Media and Advertising

The advertising landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, and nowhere is this more visible than online. The advertising medium is experiencing perhaps, the most dynamic revolution and technological developments made possible by the growth of communication through interactive media. The advertising industry has long sought to go where consumers go. Indeed, the industry has followed consumers online, even developing new forms of advertising to relate to consumers in their virtual world. In fact, the very philosophy of advertising has changed, not wholly but in large part, as a result of the opportunities created online (Tuten 2008:1). Consequently, Social media advertising is a recent addition to organisations’ integrated marketing communications plans. Integrated marketing communications coordinates the elements of the promotional mix; advertising, personal selling, public relations, publicity, direct marketing, and sales promotion. In the traditional marketing communications model, the content, frequency, timing, and medium of communications by an organisation is in collaboration with an external agent, i.e. advertising agencies, marketing research firms, and public relations firms. However, the growth of social media has impacted the way organisations communicate. With the emergence of Web 2.0, the Internet provides a set of tools that allow people to build social and business connections, share information and collaborate on projects online (Corruthers 2010). He notes further that social media marketing programmes usually center on efforts to create content that attracts attention and encourages readers to share it with their social networks. A corporate message spreads from user to user and presumably resonates because it is coming from a trusted source, as opposed to the brand or company itself. Social media have become a platform that is easily accessible to anyone with Internet access, opening doors for organisations to increase their brand awareness and facilitate conversations with the customer. Additionally, social media serve as a relatively inexpensive platform for organisations to implement marketing campaigns. The Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON) defines advertising as a form of communication through media about products, services or ideas paid for by an identified sponsor (Okoro, 1998). However, advertising, when conceived for an online environment and given contextual differences in its capabilities, functions, and the medium’s nuances, requires a new paradigm. The current definition of advertising states that advertising must be paid communications. Certainly, that is the model by which advertising has operated since its conception. But now some of the most valuable advertising may be unpaid, or indirectly paid as in the case of CGM (consumer-generated media), some aspects of social media advertising, and the viral spread of brand messages (Tuten, 2008:2). He notes further that advertising has traditionally been viewed as one-way communication, delivered from the advertiser through some media vehicle to a receiver, the target audience. Thinking of advertising as one-way communication limits what is possible, particularly online. In a world with Web 2.0 (Social media), advertising encounters a new phase. Social media enables interactive capabilities in an environment characterized by user control, freedom, and dialogue and brings a new degree of interactivity and consumer involvement to advertising applications. It truly enables twoway (or multi-way) communication between brands and consumers. Online, advertising becomes more about conversations, connections, and shared control and less about passive consumption of packaged content (Tuten, 2008. Dominick (2009) explains that advertising is not only paid for in this era but word of mouth (viral advertising) is used to harness paid advertising. Advertising through traditional media relied on a model of interrupting and disrupting consumers’ life. “Interruption because the key to each and every ad is to interrupt what the viewers are doing in order to get them to think about something else” (Chaney, 2009:37). He notes further that consumers accepted these interruptions, served in the form of advertising, because they accepted that it was a necessary price to pay for what was otherwise free content broadcast on television, radio, and magazines. In that world, established content publishers controlled the distribution of content targeted at consumers. The interruption-disruption model is dying in the world of social media, where consumers control their media content and may even create the content. According to Deloitte and Touche’s “The State of the Media Democracy” report, 40% of Internet users create some form of content whether it be editing videos, posting photos, or writing blogs, and 51% acknowledged reading and watching the content of other users online. With younger consumers, the consumption of user-generate content is even higher with 71% reporting watching and/or reading user-generated content online (Tuten, 2008:3). “While too many advertisers are still focused on the business of shouting one message over and over, today the most important communication is not the marketing monologue, but the dialogue that takes place among customers”. Consumers are becoming insurgent, rising in revolt against slick, overly produced ads in favor of recommendations by fellow consumers and user-generated content such as that found in Facebook or Twitter (Chaney 2009:34). Supporting the above, Nwosu (2003:40) asserts that “social marketing is based on the new marketing concepts insistence that we must be customer oriented and customer driven in all that we do, for example, discussion, planning and execution in order to give maximum satisfaction to his needs and wants”. Corruthers (2010: Para 2) explains that developing healthy relationships with consumers and other companies is key to reputation building in social media. He notes further that an effective advertisement goes a long way as it encourages people to buy and trust a certain product or service. Once the audience is convinced that the company’s product is worth spending their money on, the company becomes an influence in that field of business. Brogan and Smith (cited in Chaney, 2009: 34) assert that, “we are suspicious of marketing. We do not trust strangers as willingly. Instead, consumers and business people alike are looking towards trust. We want our friends to tell us it is good. We want someone we know to say we should look into it’’. Consumers no longer trust corporate spokespeople or their messages. In fact, the 9th Annual Edelman Trust Barometer Report, revealed that people now say their most credible source of information about a company and its products is ‘‘a person like me’’ a trust level in peers that, in the United States, has skyrocketed from only 22 percent a few years ago to 60 percent today. More than 80 percent of people surveyed also said that they would refuse to buy goods or services from a company they do not trust. The fact is that consumers are demanding a decision-making voice in shaping the products, services, and media they consume (Chaney, 2009: 34). According to Diamond (2010: 21) the paradigm shift is a transfer of power. Not only do customers want to be asked permission by marketers, they want to actively engage in and participate in the product conversation. They want to tell a company what they think, how they view their brand, and how they can improve. Evans & Mckee (2010:11) explain that “engagement on the Social Web means that customers become participants rather than viewers”. Social media have granted consumers the authority to speak up, and their voices are being heard loud and clear. While companies may want them (consumers) to buy their products, these empowered consumers want those same companies to pay attention and give them a seat at the table. They no longer want to be merely passive consumers of products and services, but active participants helping to cocreate them (Chaney, 2009:17, (The Economist 2006, April 22, para.2).

For social media advertising to thrive, Praise and Guinan (2008:1) explain that an organisation’s marketing department should accept giving up some control and instead facilitate customers in driving the organisation’s value proposition. Constantinidies (n.d) remarks that an organisation ought to define standards of conduct for their social marketing to thrive. Guidelines in social media do not only specify rules and permissions but also responsibilities, tasks and timeframes. This is because unattended social media lose audience (Barnes & Mattson (2009).

SMALL AND MEDUIM SCALE BUSINESSES AND SOCIAL MEDIA USAGE

Companies, seeing the growth of social media usage among consumers, are starting to use them in their marketing strategy due to their low cost and their popularity. These platforms are being used to build their brand, increase awareness, measure their reputation from customer relationships (Harris & Rae, 2009), for brand management (branding) (Christodoulides, 2009), to communicate with their customers (Jansen, Zhang, Sobel & Chowdury, 2009). However, there are different ways to use social media in the business world. Companies can obtain data from user’s natural behavior and activity. This allows the exploration of behavior patterns from friend requests, follows, likes, or tweets (Hogan, 2008). This way, it allows businesses to approach consumers quickly and directly, at a relatively low cost, and with greater efficiency than traditional marketing tools. As observed, social media platforms are not only relevant for large companies but also for SMEs, profit and non-profit organizations, or the government (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). And even though companies can measure some elements of interaction with their customers through statistics offered by social media networks or from specialized computer programs; it is still unclear whether the strategic or tactical impact is high or low. In fact, there is a consensus among marketing professionals that there is a complex problem when measuring and monetizing marketing activities in social networks (Clemons, 2009). In this new social media universe of user-generated content, businesses play a fundamental role in it, as consumers share their enthusiasm about their favorite brand through these platforms (Hennig-Thurau, Malthouse, Friege, Gensler, Lobschat, Rangaswamy, & Skiera, 2010), by commenting on its products and services (Chan & Ngai, 2011). Although the influence of social media marketing on business’ performance remains an unknown topic, there is no doubt that they play a key role in the future of marketing (Harris & Rae, 2009). Confirming Lindgreen, Palmer, & Vanhamme (2004), who anticipated that electronic and interactive marketing, as well as network marketing, would have greater development in the upcoming years. It should be noted that not everything related to internet advertisement can be considered as positive. There can be privacy or data security problems which suggest that social networks require structural control; otherwise, their attractiveness, credibility, and content value may decrease significantly (Otto & Simon, 2008).

Despite the negative sides aforementioned about internet advertisement, Öztamur & Karakadılar (2014) emphasize their importance in online marketing since this type of advertisement has increased for small and medium businesses. They mention companies have to be present where the consumer is and carry out their marketing strategies accordingly. Now, the usage of social media has become popular among consumers, therefore, companies have to develop their strategies there in a more planned and structured way to make them more effective. Social media marketing has modified the way to attract and keep new customers; some features may include having an attractive content and environment, where the public can obtain information (Öztamur, & Karakadılar, 2014).

An essential element in social media marketing is that it must be focused on the consumers; there must be an interaction between the promotional campaign and the consumers that receive it. Moreover, social media marketing represents a dramatic, but beneficial change when it comes to searching and purchasing goods and services regardless of advertising, marketing campaigns or messages; with it, customers make decisions on their own terms, relying on trusted networks to form opinions of a brand (Paquette, 2013). As previously stated by Katona et al. (2011) it is necessary that companies have a professional presence in the main social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. whose main objective is not the sale of products and services, but their exposure to the public; creating a community of users with an emotional link with the brand (Iankova, Davies, Archer-Brown, Marder, & Yau, 2019). Therefore, as Lorenzo-Romero et al. (2011) implied, the main goal of social media networks for companies’ brands is to convert strangers into friends, friends into customers and customers into brand evangelists. For this reason, having social media platforms have become an excellent marketing tool for businesses. After all, as advertised by many popular social media networks, creating an account would not represent any investment since they are absolutely free of cost. However, it is worth mentioning that businesses can still find paid advertising within social media networks if they wish to.

BENEFITS OF SOCIAL MEDIA (TWITTER) ADVERTISING

Millions of people around the globe through social networking are recently building online local, regional and global communities to communicate their shared interests and activities, disseminate information and interact through a variety of web based tools (Eid & Ward, 2009). While the Internet is changing the ways companies design and implement their entire business and marketing communication programmes, “companies need to see potential and existing clients on social media as communities to be built and nurtured rather than just customers who are potential purchasers of goods and services” (Fyfe, 2009). He maintains that while social media collectively can be considered interactive communication vehicles, corporate communicators must learn to distinguish the components of various social media, each of which has unique strengths.

According to Sandberg (2010, para3), on Facebook, people do everything from remembering their friends' birthdays to reuniting with old classmates. In a more connected world, advertisers are social too. This gives individuals the chance to connect to the companies and brands they like and learn more about their products and services. Arens, Weigold and Arens (2011) remark “online media enable businesses and other organisations to nurture and develop relationships with their customers and other stakeholders, in a way never before available on a global scale at very efficient cost”. Saverin (2010) agrees that “as the Web increasingly democratises innovation and costs, anyone can showcase a product on Facebook.

According to Dunay & Krueger (2010) Facebook offers Business to consumer marketers (B2C) an excellent brand-building environment because of its viral marketing capabilities and “offers relevant and integrated advertising opportunities to engage a client’s target audience” (Nweze, 2009). Facebook allows companies to interact with their customers to gain valuable consumer insight thus “marketers interact with people in the same way that people interact in real life, users will expect to interact and engage with brands in the same way they interact with each other” (Schaffel, 2009).

A Facebook page improves a company’s search engine rankings. This is made possible because, Facebook pages are publicly available to everyone, (personal profiles can also be made available to public search engines via search engine privacy, regardless of whether the viewer is a Facebook member or not. This last point is important because public availability of Facebook pages means that search engines, such as Google, can find and index these pages, often improving a company’s positioning in search results. Facebook Pages are used by brands and are equivalents to user profiles. A page is the location on the site where entrepreneurs/companies write all about themselves. Some of the most powerful social targeting features become useful when such companies have a large number of Page members or users”. (Zarrella & Zarrella, 2011). He notes further that although some brands attract millions of fans to their Facebook Pages through paid advertisement, “there are also some brands that their marketing strategies take advantage of the viral power of Facebook, relying on fan participation to generate a stream of news feed stories, which in turn create word-of-mouth awareness and attract new fans to the page”. Special events such as symposium, trade fare, seminar etc. can be created by a company on their page and “invites” sent to their network of friends (Fans). While commercial messages posted on a company’s Facebook page and their events are restricted to their Fans, the paid advertisement appears on the right hand side of a Facebook page whose owner falls within the target market of the advertiser as indicated during the creation of the advertisement. Pages can help a company promote their business on Facebook through the following:

Wall

The Wall tab serves as the central component of a Facebook page and is similar to a personal profile. The Wall allows an organisation and their fans to upload content, such as photos, videos, and notes. These actions generate updates (called stories on Facebook) and often display as stories on a fans’ News Feed.

News Feed

News Feed displays these stories and publishes any new social action that takes place on an organisation’s Page to their fans. For example, an addition of a new photo to an organisation’s Page is reported as a story on their News Feed.

Status Updates

If a company wants to push out a message, the addition of status updates is a welcome tool in the Facebook marketer’s toolbox. Like in personal profiles where users update their status by typing any kind of message, Pages allow a Page administrator of an organisation to send a limitless stream of updates (short messages up to 160 characters in length), which, in turn, appear in their fans’ News Feeds. These messages can be information about their products/services or their recent activities.

THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON THE DEVELOPMENT AND SUSTAINABILITY OF SMEs

Aside the negative and positiive effect of social media marketing the following high level of impact has been suggested by (2017) as the advantages of using social media in small business.

Customer Relationship Management

Tom Funk writes in “Social Media Playbook for Business: Reaching Your Online Community with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and More" that the principle advantage of a social media program is the opportunity to strengthen the relationship between a company and its customers. Through real-time online connections with existing and potential customers, a company conveys information regarding its brand. In turn, the company might benefit from positive word-of-mouth that is exponentially broadcast across a social network. Funk states that the greater the frequency and degree of engagement, the stronger the relationships become and the greater the impact of the relationships on sales, customer satisfaction and product reputation.

Customer Retention

Funk writes that 67 percent of Twitter users who become followers of a brand are more likely to buy the brand's products. This sales result is due in part to a company's use of social media to convey brand values, create positive word of mouth and enforce the connection between the company and its customers. These enhance a company's efforts to build customer loyalty.

Expansion of Customer Base

According to Funk, companies reach new customers through the conveyance of the corporate message on a social media channel, the broadcast of positive customer feedback regarding the corporate message and its products to some of the 100 million Twitter users and 500 million Facebook users, and the conversion of the feedback to product purchases. The broadcast of such third-party endorsements complement such traditional marketing efforts such as print and broadcast advertisements.

Market Research

Stephen Rappaport writes in "Listen First: Turning Social Media Conversations into Business Advantage" that social media is a reliable means to explore the culture, views and lifestyles that influence consumer behavior. The social media arena is a means to profile a target audience to develop marketing and advertising strategies. Social media conversations also alert companies to issues that may negatively affect current market opportunities. Product Marketing A product can be directly marketed to the consumer using social media. Such marketing amplifies messages that are conveyed by other product promotions, including website advertisements and press releases. Achievement of Competitive Advantage Funk states that 80 percent of Fortune 100 companies are active in one or more social media channels, such as Twitter. The ability to listen to a competitor's message enables a company to develop business strategies and tactics that directly counter that competitor's initiatives. This helps your company to gain a competitive advantage. For example, data transmitted by McDonald's regarding future franchise locations is a key criterion used by Burger King in the selection of its franchise locations. This gives Burger King a cost advantage in terms of saving market research expenses.

Cost Control Initiatives

A reliance on relatively low-cost social media channels to market products to millions of consumers supports a company's efforts to control costs of essential functions, including sales, marketing and customer service. For example, a company can maximize its return on marketing dollars by relying on social media to reach some customers rather than higher cost television advertisements.

Public Relations

Corporate news can be conveyed to an audience in real time using multiple social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. According to Funk, a legal or investor relations department relies on multiple social media channels to improve audience engagement, which is key to the success of efforts to control bad news that can "go viral" or be quickly disseminated to a large number of social media participants once the news emerges. Sales Funk states that sales can be increased by adding social media functions to corporate websites. For example, customer product ratings, "fan" and "email friend" options serve as ways to engage website users. This leads to user and company engagement that contribute to increased product sales.

Recruiting

In "Social Media for Business: 101 Ways to Grow Your Business Without Wasting Your Time," Susan Sweeney writes that the social media platform is a cost-effective way to directly reach potential employees in that four out of five online Americans participate in a form of social media each month. Such a program also is a means to determine if a recruiting program resonates with potential employees through the feedback the company acquires regarding such items as the positions advertised and the recruitment program itself.

IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA USAGE ON SMEs

The social media has made a lot impact in businesses ranging from the the positive to the negative. Modern media is no longer confined to a television or radio show, newspaper or advertisement. Instead, today's media -- from text to video and sound -- can be saved and shared electronically, using everything from desktop computers to small mobile devices. This electronic dissemination of media has had a powerful impact on the way people communicate for personal reasons, school and even business.

Faster Information

Thanks to digital media, companies can get their information out to the public faster than ever. Instead of printing inserts and waiting for the Sunday paper to announce their sales, companies now can let the world know about an exciting promotion through email, social networking, their websites and Internet ads. However, digital media can spread bad information about a business just as fast as it can spread good. A video or camera taken with a cell phone or a Facebook status update featuring a company secret or faux pas can go viral within minutes, leaving a business's reputation damaged when business before digital media would have been able to clear up the mess long before it went public.

Greater Reach

Digital media means businesses can reach more customers than ever before. A simple promotion featuring a giveaway or a freebie can earn a business hundreds or thousands of Facebook fans and email and text message subscribers, meaning that the business can send a message to these consumers with just a touch of a button. However, digital media also means that those consumers can reach back. Through negative comments to your Facebook page and other social networking sites, like Twitter and your blog, customers can use digital media to take a complaint that would have otherwise been between the two of you world wide.

Technology

Using digital media means using new technology both to create and support the media. New technology can be an asset for your business. When you adopt smartphones and laptops in order to use digital media, you also can positively influence other areas of your business. For example, such mobile technology makes communication among employees much easier. However, new technology is expensive, and sometimes it does not have the positive effect its champions think it will have. For example, "Information Week" notes that a number of companies gave its employees home computers when the Internet first became popular hoping that those employees would be a positive influence for the company online. However, the program really ended up causing support and tax problems for the companies and employees.

Options

Thanks to digital media, businesses now have many more options that they can choose from when seeking to get word out about their businesses. Instead of choosing among a TV or radio commercial or a print advertisement, they can now create media that is a combination of audio, visual, text and interactive media. This mixed media can appeal to a larger audience with differentiated preferences. However, it is also more costly to keep up with the ever-changing technology and may require the creation of new strategists who can think and create digital.

Achieving Brand Awareness

Every business wants to reach to the higher brand recognition in the market. It is important to achieve awareness of the product and the link with the brand for its consumer market when the product is newly launched by the business (Kumar & Moller, 2018). There are many ways but according to Aaker (1991), he discussed many factors that can be helpful for a brand to achieve maximum brand awareness: The most important factor in achieving better awareness about the brand is to have a different and unique slogans that represent the brand and its image to the customers as it helps them to get a clear image of the brand instantly and identification whenever they find out or read it somewhere. Thus the use of social media platform can enable small businesses achieve brand awareness

2.2 THEORITICAL FRAMEWORK

This work adopted Gratification theory

Gratification Theory was propounded in 1974 by Elihu Katz, Jay Blumler and Michael Gurevitch. “The theory was developed to explain why audiences do not passively wait for media messages to arrive, but actively and deliberately seek out forms of content that provide them with information that they need, like and use” ( Kur, 2003:34). Folarin (2005: 65) observes that the theory perceives the recipient of media messages as actively influencing the effect process, he selectively chooses, attends to, perceives and retains the media messages on the basis of his needs and beliefs. This 42 implies that “members of the public will actively select and use specific forms of media content to fulfill their needs and to provide gratifications of their interests and motives Defleur & Dennis (1994:559). The uses and gratifications perspective takes the view of the media consumer. It examines how people use the media and the gratification they seek and receive from their media behaviours. Uses and gratifications researchers assume that audience members are aware of and can articulate their reasons for consuming various media content (Wimmer and Dominick 2003: 403). Consequently, when applied to this study, social media allow for participation as they give the advertisers and customers the opportunity to interact with each other on a one-on-one basis. The implication is that business organizations or entrepreneurs who use social media are active as they willingly create their Facebook page or Twitter account. The business organization chooses social media as a means to fulfill their wants and goals over other sources. Basically, the business organization/entrepreneur sign up an account on Facebook or Twitter for a particular purpose. That is, the need to connect with customers to promote a product/service. For other users, it could be the need to connect interpersonally with friends or the need to patronize a product/ service advertised on those social platforms or just to know an organization they are interested in the better. The assumption is that those who decide to patronize adverts on Facebook and Twitter may be doing so because of the gratification they hope to derive from those messages. While those who do not patronize the messages, may not have seen any gratification in the messages.

2.3 EMPIRICAL STUDIES

According to Return on Investment Research 2011, social networking accounts for one of every six minutes spent online. There are 750 million active Facebook users across the globe and 31% of Facebook users are on the site multiple times every day. Edison Research revealed that 24% of consumers consult their Facebook friends before making a purchase. More than one in three consumers say they are likely to purchase from a company they follow on Facebook and Twitter (eMarketer). 53% of Facebook users would recommend a brand or company's product to friends (Facebook Success Summit 2011).

In a result of their seventh annual survey on social media marketing adoption released by integrated marketing services provider- Alterian on Jan 21, 2010, the survey 37 revealed that, 66 percent of respondents will be investing in social media marketing in 2010. Of those, 40 percent said they would be shifting more than a fifth of their traditional direct marketing budget towards funding their Social media activities. The survey also revealed that more than 36 percent of respondents are investing in social media monitoring and analysis tools. Nearly half of respondents (42 percent), however, said they do not currently incorporate clickstream and web analytics data into their customer and e-mail database. The research also revealed that over half of respondents (51 percent) are placing a ‘fair’ or ‘significant’ amount of effort on moving from a campaign-centric direct marketing model towards multichannel customer engagement. In fact, only 7 percent make no effort at all. The survey covered 1068 marketing professionals worldwide, 98% North America and Europe and 2% Asia Pacific and other region (Wauters, 2010: 3).

In a study by Anderson Analytics and Marketing Executives Networking Group titled “Marketing Trends 2010” the report revealed some interesting insights in the minds of marketing executives. When marketing executives were asked to choose the most important trends and buzzwords to pay attention to in 2010, getting a good return on marketing efforts was number one with 58% saying it was the most important trend to keep an eye on. But what is even more interesting is that social media made the top 10 list with 42% choosing it as one of the top trends to watch. In addition, 72% said they work for companies that are planning social media initiatives in 2010 (Porterfield 2010, March 29). This survey corroborates the findings by eMarketer which revealed that 92% of marketers use Facebook and 75% of marketers plan to increase their use in 2011 (2011 Social Media Marketing Industry Report). A study jointly conducted and released by Nielsen and Facebook took a good look at Facebook and the value of ads campaigns. The study titled, “Advertising Effectiveness: Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression,” analysed data from over 800,000 Facebook users and more than 125 Facebook ad campaigns across 70 different brands. This study used 3 criteria to determine the value of ad campaigns on Facebook; Brand Awareness, Purchase Intent and Ad Recall and also determined how paid media, 38 “earned” and peer-to-peer advocacy contribute to ad campaigns. Nielsen defined “Earned Media” as advertising that is shared among friends and beyond. Nielsen looked at 14 Facebook ad campaigns that used “Become a Fan” as the engagement point, or call to action, and then determined the effectiveness in 3 ways: Lift from a standard Homepage Ad, Lift from Homepage Ads with Social Context and Lift from Organic Ads. The study showed some great insights regarding how peer-to-peer advocacy and recommendations affect social media ad campaigns. The findings revealed that people who viewed ads with social contexts had higher response rates than people who viewed the same ads without social context. Ad recall grew from 10% to 16%, awareness doubled from 4% to 8%, purchase intent jumped from 2% to 8%. The result proved that social media users had a direct impact on other users when it comes to ads, and that social media are fast and effective way to advertise products or services (Brooke 2010:).