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Introduction
Terms like social media, social networks, blogs, and online communities are all ideas incorporated within the philosophy known as Web 2.0. Tools provided through Web 2.0 facilitate the creation of computer-mediated social networking and internet users' collaboration (Sigala, 2009). Social media is the gathering place for a large pool of consumers. It is the repository of consumer information and acts as a means of spreading information to build market presence (Hsu, 2012). Due to the interactive nature of social media, organizations are now building and maintaining social media public pages to improve their social network salience, enhance interest in their organizations, and build relationships with the online public. Social media is growing as an important strategic tool among organizations (Gomez Vasquez and Soto Velez, 2011).
As of 2011, more than 50 per cent of social media users follow brands on social media (Belleghem et al. , 2011) and organizations are increasingly investing in social media, indicated by the worldwide marketing spending on social networking sites of about $4.3 billion (Williamson, 2011). Malaysia is chosen as the focus of the study, as it is one among the eight individual markets in Asia that uses social media extensively, with Facebook as the top social media site (Edosomwan et al. , 2011). Also, a survey statistics shows that 52 per cent of Malaysian organizations devote up to 20 per cent of their marketing budget to business social networking activities (Regus, 2011). As such, understanding the degree to which such investment improves the organizations' performance is increasingly important. However, it has not been easy to prove the positive impact of these investments on organizational performance (Carmichael et al. , 2011).
Social media facilitates two-way communication between customers and organizations. Organizations that take advantage of the latest social media technologies seem to outperform their competitors and report benefits such as lower costs and improved efficiencies (Harris and Rea, 2009; Eisenfeld and Fluss, 2009). Therefore, it is important to investigate the specific impact of social media on organizational performance. Even though social media is widely recognized among Malaysian businesses, studies on the trends and impact of social media in organizations have yet to be widely recorded and published (Shahizan et al. , 2012). Therefore this study aims to answer...