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Top1. Introduction
Knowledge is an essential resource for organizational growth, especially for organizations striving in unpredictable environments to sustain competitive advantage (Miller & Shamsie, 1996). Nevertheless, most organizations do not possess all the required knowledge within their formal boundaries but depend on connections outside organizations to obtain further information (Wasko & Faraj, 2005). Members of the organization, such as employees and employers, require expanding their knowledge base to derive and revive organizational innovation. Organizational members are interested in business networking and making linkages to the people outside the organization to develop new business contacts, grab new ideas and get opinions on different issues and processes that may be useful for their personal growth and their organization.
Social networking sites (SNSs) have drastically changed the way people connect, share, communicate and interact with each other. For example, Facebook and Twitter started as platforms for individuals to connect and express their thoughts and happenings mainly by sharing pictures, writing comments, texting and chatting. However, SNSs have gradually evolved as a forum for the commercial and social exchange of information, which included job networking, entertainment and targeted marketing (Clark & Roberts, 2010).
Opportunities to interact face to face have become limited due to multinational and national companies scattered in different regions. It is now possible to connect with people outside the organization through SNSs (Wasko & Faraj, 2005). SNSs, now, have opened the ways for employees to interact, share and transfer knowledge internally (employees of the same organization) and externally (employees in other regions, organizations and with consumers), and helped organizations achieved a competitive advantage over their competitors (Bashir, Papamichail, & Malik, 2017).
1.1. SNSs Usage in Asia and Pakistan
Globally, the highest SNSs penetration rate of around 70% was in North America and Eastern Asia (Kemp, 2019). Facebook, for example, has above 1 million monthly active users in Asia and over 270 miollion users from India – the largest population on Facebook (Omnicore, 2020). Moreover, 32.8% of all Twitter users were from the Asia Pacific region, with Indonesia having the highest percentage of 84%, followed by India, with 67% of the online population (Go-Globe, 2015).
However, many Asian countries use native social media platforms instead of global giants such as Facebook and Twitter. For example, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are hardly accessible due to censorship laws followed by China and therefore, created their mobile platforms such as San Weibo similar to Twitter (Choi, 2020). Korea and Japan also developed some of the popular SNSs local apps and websites that come in the global top 20 most visited website such as Korea’s Naver which is similar to Youtube and Japan’s yahoo.co.jp.
Similarly, the introduction of mobile broadband (third-generation (3G) and fourth generation (4G) networks) coupled with the influx of budgeted smartphones have exponentially raised the usage of SNSs in Pakistan (Nisar, 2018). SNSs users in Pakistan have more than 44 million accounts, including 30 million Facebook accounts (WebDesk, 2017). Fashion, telecom, e-commerce, and food are the top industries on Facebook in Pakistan (Bakers, 2017; WebDesk, 2017). Also, amid lockdown and social distancing due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, more people in Pakistan and around the world have joined SNSs to continue their office work, connect and virtually meet with their colleagues and friends, and access latest updates on COVID-19. The internet traffic in Pakistan has increased by 15% in times of pandemic, utilizing most of the bandwidth to use SNSs (Jahangir, 2020).