Empirical Study on the Determinants of Social Media Adoption By Turkish Small And Medium Enterprises

Abstract

Social media has become a major issue for companies. Nonetheless, few studies specifically researched the determinants of social media adoption and the barriers against it, at a small and medium entreprises (SMEs) level aspect. This study addresses the gap by focusing in furthering the theory in social media adoption at SMEs level. Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are not well equipped to use Social Media (SM) and struggle to utilise its full potential in the context of adding value to the business. The main aim of this study is to investigate the adoption and use of social media by Turkish small and medium enterprises, on the basis of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Network Externality, and Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) models by adding the related constructs. The research model is empirically assessed SMEs’ adoption behavior of the social media using a primary data set of 473 users of social media gathered from a web-based questionnaire survey. Partial Least Squares (PLS) method is a variance based Structural Equation Model (SEM) used for the analyse of the data in order to reveal the relationship of the attitudes of SMEs regarding social media and to evalaute the harmony of the model. The results demonstrate that the revised social media model proposed in this study supports all the hypotheses of social media usage behavior.