Use of Social Media for SMEs in Saudi Arabia: Developing an Applicable Method to Measure the ROI of Social Media Use

Abstract

Although much of existing research indicates that social media has empowered customers over companies, social media has proved its effectiveness as a marketing tool for business. Measurement of the effectiveness of this tool can be difficult to obtain, especially by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). That is for two main reasons (i) the nature of social media as two-way social communication tool that contains quantitative and qualitative data that are difficult to interpret and measure, (ii) SMEs do not usually have sufficient knowledge and financial sources to do such measurement. Thus, this study investigates the current use of social media by Saudi SMEs and identifies the factors that affected the adoption of social media in order to develop an applicable framework to measure the return of investment (ROI) of social media use. It is expected that this framework will help SMEs to improve their marketing performance by directing their investments to meet the right marketing objectives. Interviews were held by 14 small and medium restaurants in Saudi Arabia. The finding of this study indicates social media has been adopted widely by Saudi SMEs due to its ease of use and high usefulness. Thus, the suggested ROI measurement framework needs to be easy to use and the SMEs can perceive its usefulness directly. These two features were found in the framework that was developed by McCann and Barlow (2014) with minor adjustments.