THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA USE ON THE INTERNATIONALISATION OF SMES

Abstract

Social media (SM) are one of the marketing tools growing in importance with increasing digitalisation. Companies use marketing to increase interest in their services or reach new customers. Therefore, SM can help companies access a new international market. The aim of this paper is to determine the impact of SM as a marketing strategy tool to gain a new market in the process of internationalisation of SMEs in the countries of Visegrad Four. The paper also evaluates differences in SM approaches according to the selected factors. To obtain relevant data, Tomas Bata University in Zlín organised empirical research in 2019-2020. The online form of the questionnaire was distributed among randomly selected SMEs. In total, 1,585 managers’ responses were analysed. The t-test was performed to compare means and the chisquare test was used to assess differences between variables. Data analysis was performed with SPSS 23 software. A statistically significant difference was found in the perception of the impact of SM on business performance. No statistically significant differences were shown in the case of SM use and the relation to internationalisation.