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.