Social media as a communication tool for small and medium enterprises: Lessons learned on best practices for companies with limited budget

• Autor(a) principal: Barata, Joana Amaro
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/18860
• topic: Small and medium enterprises; Digital marketing; Social media; Best practices; Marketing digital; PME Pequenas e Médias Empresas; Rede social; Boas práticas -- Good habits; Imagem de marca

In businesses nowadays, social media is essential to reach and interact with potential customers, with the goal of increasing brand awareness, sales, ROI, and customer acquisition and retainment. In this dissertation, best practices on social media communication for small and medium enterprises with a limited budget are determined. This research conducted qualitative and quantitate studies, where eight in-depth interviews took place with the goal of better understanding how marketing in SMEs works and a content analyses on 1087 LinkedIn posts was done to test the proposed hypotheses. Based on the literature, nine hypotheses were proposed, studying the impact that variables such as vividness and interactivity had on the number of likes, number of comments and engagement. Results based on the literature show that more followers on brand pages and curated content on brand posts have a positive impact on engagement. Human faces on brand posts do not have an impact on engagement. Furthermore, the higher the level of vividness, the higher the number of likes. On the contrary, low and medium interactivity factors and giveaways brand posts have a negative impact on the number of likes and a high level of interactivity do not impact on the number of likes. Additionally, the higher the level of vividness, the higher the number of comments and interactivity in brand posts does not have an impact on the number comments. At last, theoretical and practical implications are exposed and future studies are proposed.