Social media in operations and supply chain management: A systematic literature review to explore the future

Abstract

Increased use of social media (SM) has led to the generation of a huge quantity of data. Businesses are increasingly using the SM platforms and the data generated on these platforms in area of marketing, co-creation, and customer involvement. However, the contribution of SM in operations and supply chain management (OSCM) context is still not clear. The aim of this study is to perform an extant literature review of SM in the OSCM context and highlight the applications, methods, and future of SM in OSCM. Systematic literature review approach has been adopted in this study to organize, analyze, and synthesize the existing literature. The results highlight that the disruptive potential of SM has not been fully realized by the OSCM practitioners and researchers and hence the area of SM-OSCM integration is in the nascent stage. Further, the study sheds light on the current applications of SM in OSCM, underlines tools and techniques used by the researchers, and propose future research direction. The study outlines SM characteristics and examples of SM applications in OSCM field. Thus, giving insights to the practitioners and emphasizing the need to incorporate SM to improve OSCM performance. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first attempt to analyze the existing literature in the intersection of SM-OSCM, and highlight the significance of incorporating SM in OSCM to improve OSCM performance.