Determinants of Social Media Marketing Adoption among Small and Medium Enterprises in Dar es Salaam - Tanzania

Abstract

The general objective of the study was to examine the determinants of social media
marketing adoption among Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Ilala
Municipality, Dar es Salaam. The study provides the effects of technological,
organizational and environmental factors on adoption of social media marketing
in the SMEs sector. This study used descriptive research design; thus primary data
were collected using a structured questionnaire, whereas multiple regression
analysis was used to analyse the collected data from 122 SMEs owners who were
selected through simple random sampling. The SPSS software was used for data
analysis. The results from multiple regression analysis showed that technological
factors had positive and significant relationship with the adoption of social media
marketing in SMEs (p = 0.001). Moreover, the findings showed that organisational
factors and adoption of social media marketing were positively related (p = 0.000).
Furthermore, the findings indicated that there was positive and significant
relationship between environmental factors and adoption of social media
marketing in SMEs (p = 0.002). The study concludes that technological,
organizational and environmental factors determine social media marketing
adoption for SMEs. However, organizational factors are the major determinants of
social media marketing adoption in SMEs. The study recommends that the
management of SMEs should improve organizational environment such as
employee skills by providing training in order to increase the use of social media
marketing in SMEs. Government should provide support and comprehensive policy
to foster growth of SMEs in Tanzania through adoption of social media marketing,
and the SMEs management should accommodate technology innovation to support
easy adoption of Social media marketing.