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 studiesspecifically researched the determinants of social media adoption and the barriersagainst it, at a small and medium entreprises (SMEs) level aspect. This study addressesthe 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 byTurkish small and medium enterprises, on the basis of Technology Acceptance Model(TAM), Network Externality, and Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT) models by addingthe related constructs. The research model is empirically assessed SMEs’ adoptionbehavior of the social media using a primary data set of 473 users of social mediagathered from a web-based questionnaire survey. Partial Least Squares (PLS) method isa variance based Structural Equation Model (SEM) used for the analyse of the data inorder to reveal the relationship of the attitudes of SMEs regarding social media and toevalaute the harmony of the model. The results demonstrate that the revised socialmedia model proposed in this study supports all the hypotheses of social media usagebehavior.