Social Media for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Types of Social Media Tools

SMEs are beginning to capitalize on social media tools in a variety of ways. Users contribute to the development of content through writing comments and recommendations on Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, submitting videos on YouTube, co-designing games like The Sims, creating avatars in virtual environments like Second Life, or developing open source codes for Linux (Lee, 2011). Most of the SMEs adopted social media to some degree. A survey of decision-makers in German SMEs indicates that SMEs started to use internal social media (e.g., wikis, blogs) in order to support collaboration among employees and to improve knowledge management (Meske & Stieglitz, 2013). However, SMEs still face problems in identifying relevant business values. This section introduces five types of social media tools for SMEs.