Social Media Marketing for Growth of SMEs

Abstract

With the growth of Internet and smartphone penetration in India, The Social Media is moving large segment of the people in many ways. The Social Media’s acceptance led by social media marketing channels offers marvelous control to the marketers to do accurate targeting in a very cost efficient ways. The literature review suggests that SMEs are facing problems in terms of doing promotional & marketing activities due to financial constraints. Most of Indian SMEs have their focus on operational and administrative activities, so for them marketing and promotion of business is not priority or still they are using traditional media for promotion. It further suggests that awareness of social media marketing strategies is very less among SMEs. Due to less awareness of social media very few SMEs are using social media marketing for their business growth. It is one of the cost effective ways through which companies can access new market, increase sales revenue, can easily do competitor’s analysis and maintain customer relationship management. Very few researchers have done research related to marketing problems faced by SMEs and come out with the solution to handle marketing and promotional activity of SMEs. The purpose of this paper is study social media marketing usage in SMEs of Ahmedabad its impact on their business growth. Data is collected from Ahmedabad based SMEs to identify factors affecting social media marketing adoption by small business owners.