Abstract
The adoption of social media by large businesses has influenced small medium enterprises (SMEs) to be part of this phenomenon. Evaluating the results of the online efforts is a prerequisite to the success of social media adoption. As more branding activities move online, marketers are faced with the realisation that brands and businesses are not always relevant in all the social media facets. The study is aimed at solving the question of how SMEs in Malaysia are evaluating their online marketing efforts. The quantitative survey was deployed across six states in Peninsular Malaysia to get feedback from 125 active firms from different size, sector, year of establishment, and period of use of social media. The pattern of all these participants conducting the evaluation phase on the social media platform is descriptively examined from quantitative findings. It is used to formulate new information into literature and body of knowledge. Research implications in the practical and social form are also discussed.
TopSetting The Stage
This study has captured four issues that accompany the practice of social media evaluation among SMEs. First, the existence of evaluation practices, the second is the proper stages on performing the evaluation, the third is whether the practices succeeded in achieving the objective of social media adoption, and lastly, whether it positively helped the management's decision in attaining business missions and corporate goals. This resulted in reviewing a number of publications in a well-positioned journal and scrutinized official reports issued by government agencies as well as by industry experts.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Metric: A measuring system that quantifies a trend, dynamic, or characteristic, has been categorized to five different types: amounts (e.g., volumes, sales), percentages (e.g., fractions or decimals), counts (e.g., unit sales or number of competitors), ratings (e.g., scales), and indices (e.g., price index).
Social media: A group of internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.
Social Media Measurement: A process to gauge, explain and report the success of social media initiatives begins with the identification of social media marketing objectives, then the selection of appropriate KPIs and metrics that involves the collection of quantitative and qualitative data, and to populate metrics and generate insights which are distilled into report format to ascertain the successful alignment against firms’ business objectives, and therefore (corporate) goals.
Customer Engagement: A customer’s behavioral manifestations that go beyond transactions and have a brand or firm focus, allow firms to involve specific interactive experiences in iterative processes within the online SNS community, to build long-term relationship, and create more meaningful and sustainable interactions between the focal object (in this study, a brand) and the other actor or actors (in this study, a customer, or among customers), resulting from motivational drivers.
BRAND: Represents the face of the company, the recognizable logo, slogan, or mark that the public associates with the company.