scholarly journals The Differences in the Usage of Social Media between SMEs operating in the Iron and Mining Industries

2021 ◽  
pp. 185-194

Since Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in iron and mining industries are significant contributors not only for Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and labour creation of countries but also export volumes of nations, they have also crucial roles to reduce unemployment rates, and increase amount of exports. But comparing to their larger counterparts, SMEs encounter more financing obstacles that might make them to become non-competitive. Within this context, their usage of social media platforms might increase their competitiveness because these digital marketing channels provide less costly solutions for their activities. But depending on their characteristics, their willingness and propensity to implement social media channels in their marketing operations can show differences. In this regard, this paper intends to examine whether the usage of social media channels by SMEs in iron and mining industries differ depending on their size and length of doing business. To hit this target, the researchers have created a questionnaire survey and have directed it to the randomly selected respondents from Cribis database. 702 SMEs that operate iron and mining industries of Slovakia and Hungary have fulfilled the survey. Independent Sample T test is applied to explore differences in the selected variables. While the usage of social media platforms by smaller and larger SMEs does not differ, older SMEs apply social media channels more than younger SMEs. These results are consistent for both Slovak and Hungarian SMEs. The reason of similarities in both nations’ SMEs might be related with similar social-economic conditions of these nations, education level and experience of firm executives. The cooperation of policymakers with SMEs, universities, industrial zones, and unions to encourage the effective usage of social media channels might increase SMEs operating in mining and iron industries and their executives’ competencies and competitive postures to contest with their larger-sized counterparts.

Author(s):  
Max Z. Li ◽  
Megan S. Ryerson

Community outreach and engagement efforts are critical to an airport’s role as an ever-evolving transportation infrastructure and regional economic driver. As online social media platforms continue to grow in both popularity and influence, a new engagement channel between airports and the public is emerging. However, the motivations behind and effectiveness of these social media channels remain unclear. In this work, we address this knowledge gap by better understanding the advantages, impact, and best practices of this newly emerging engagement channel available to airports. Focusing specifically on airport YouTube channels, we first document quantitative viewership metrics, and examine common content characteristics within airport YouTube videos. We then conduct interviews and site visits with relevant airport stakeholders to identify the motivations and workflow behind these videos. Finally, we facilitate sample focus groups designed to survey public perceptions of the effectiveness and value of these videos. From our four project phases, to maximize content effectiveness and community engagement potential, we synthesize the following framework of action items, recommendations, and best practices: (C) Consistency and community; (O) Organizational structure; (M) Momentum; (B) Branding and buy-in; (A) Activity; (T) Two-way engagement; (E) Enthusiasm; and (D) Depth, or as a convenient initialism, our COMBATED framework.


Author(s):  
Zoë Glatt ◽  
Sarah Banet-Weiser ◽  
Sophie Bishop ◽  
Francesca Sobande ◽  
Elizabeth Wissinger ◽  
...  

Social media platforms are widely lauded as bastions for entrepreneurial self-actualisation and creative autonomy, offering an answer to historically exclusive and hierarchical creative industries as routes to employability and success. Social media influencers are envied by audiences as having achieved ‘the good life’, one in which they are able to ‘do what they love’ for a living (Duffy 2017). Despite this ostensive accessibility and relatability, today’s high-profile influencer culture continues to be shaped by ‘preexisting gendered and racial scripts and their attendant grammars of exclusion’ as Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) argued in the early days of socially mediated entrepreneurship (p. 89; see also Bishop, 2017). In Western contexts only a narrow subset of white, cis-gender, and heterosexual YouTubers, Instagrammers, TikTokers, and Twitch streamers tend to achieve visibility as social media star-creators, and celebratory discourses of diversity and fairness mask problematic structures that exclude marginalized identities from opportunities to attain success. A key aim of this panel is thus to draw attention to marginalized creator communities and subjectivities, including women, non-white, and queer creators, all of whom face higher barriers to entry and success. More broadly, by taking seriously both the practices and discourses of social media influencers, the panellists aim to challenge popular denigrations of influencers as vapid, frivolous, or eager to freeload. We locate such critiques in longstanding dismissals of feminized cultural production (Levine, 2013) and argue, instead, that we need to take seriously the role of influencers in various social, economic, and political configurations.


Author(s):  
Judy O'Connell

Technology and social media platforms are driving an unprecedented reorganization of the learning environment in and beyond schools around the world. Technology provides us leadership challenges, and at the same time offers opportunities for communication and learning through technology channels to support professional development. School librarians and teacher librarians are often working as the sole information practitioner in their school, and need to stay in touch with others beyond their own school to develop their personal professional capacity to lead within their school. The Australian Teacher Librarian Network aims to make a difference, and supports school library staff in Australia and around the world to build professional networks and personal learning connections, offering an open and free exchange of ideas, strategies and resources to build collegiality. This ongoing professional conversation through online and social media channels is an important way to connect, communicate and collaborate in building a vibrant future for school librarians.


Author(s):  
Shalin Hai-Jew

With the popularization of the Social Web (or Read-Write Web) and millions of participants in these interactive spaces, institutions of higher education have found it necessary to create online presences to promote their university brands, presence, and reputation. An important aspect of that engagement involves being aware of how their brand is represented informally (and formally) on social media platforms. Universities have traditionally maintained thin channels of formalized communications through official media channels, but in this participatory new media age, the user-generated contents and communications are created independent of the formal public relations offices. The university brand is evolving independently of official controls. Ex-post interventions to protect university reputation and brand may be too little, too late, and much of the contents are beyond the purview of the formal university. Various offices and clubs have institutional accounts on Facebook as well as wide representation of their faculty, staff, administrators, and students online. There are various microblogging accounts on Twitter. Various photo and video contents related to the institution may be found on photo- and video-sharing sites, like Flickr, and there are video channels on YouTube. All this digital content is widely available and may serve as points-of-contact for the close-in to more distal stakeholders and publics related to the institution. A recently available open-source tool enhances the capability for crawling (extracting data) these various social media platforms (through their Application Programming Interfaces or “APIs”) and enables the capture, analysis, and social network visualization of broadly available public information. Further, this tool enables the analysis of previously hidden information. This chapter introduces the application of Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel (NodeXL) to the empirical and multimodal analysis of a university’s electronic presence on various social media platforms and offers some initial ideas for the analytical value of such an approach.


Author(s):  
Reeta Sharma ◽  
P. K. Bhattacharya ◽  
Shantanu Ganguly ◽  
Arun Kumar

Today's world is technology-driven. Technology has penetrated almost every sphere of human life. Digital marking is one of the technologies that have attracted people from different age groups all over the world with their advanced nature of applications and uses. One of the foremost reasons why patrons like to use this technology is because these are not only user-friendly in nature and innovativeness but also carry the knowledge economies. Marketing and branding through digital media channels are very decent ventures that have steadily increased in value and are thereby considered safe and secure investments. In this chapter, the authors discuss a case study of ICDL 2016 conference where social media and other technology is widely used to market this event and catch prospective users.


Author(s):  
Niray Tunçel ◽  
Nihan Yılmaz

Social media marketing is a new form of communication between firms and consumers. The interactive nature of social media platforms enables consumers to share their perceptions about firms by creating their own content in various forms. Besides, firms are able to attract and engage with consumers through creating effective content on their social media channels. Both user-generated content (UGC) and firm-generated content (FGC) have a significant role in firm performance and consumer behavior. However, the previous studies have mostly focused on the effects of UGC and addressed the issue from the consumer side. Therefore, as distinct from existing studies, the study at hand addresses the specific effects and benefits of UGC and FGC from both the firm and consumer sides, within a theoretical framework. In addition, based on the findings of the reviewed studies, the chapter presents some practical implications for business.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma E. Duke ◽  
Kathleen C. Sitter ◽  
Nicole Boggan

Online communication continues to provide opportunities to connect, mobilize and disseminate information amongst direct service organizations. While the use of social media among non-profits continues to expand, there is a paucity of research that documents the extent to which online channels – particularly social media – are adopted and used amongst organizations that support sex workers. Online advocacy efforts have grown over the last decade, with sex workers and non-profit organizations at the forefront. This article evaluates the presence and social media strategies amongst organizations providing direct services for sex workers in Canada. Eighty-seven organizations operating in Canada were examined to assess both the types of social media channels used, and the online strategies employed. Results indicate there is a propensity for agencies to engage in multiple social media platforms with spaces for service users to post information in lieu of static sites that predominantly support one-way communication. Recommendations and best practices include integrating postings across platforms for efficiency, developing and maintaining safe spaces online, and focusing on channels that support multilogue communication.             Keywords:  Sex work, social media, knowledge


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-113
Author(s):  
Jan Žufan ◽  
Mehmet Civelek ◽  
Iveta Hamarneh ◽  
Ľubomír Kmeco

Comparing to larger businesses, SMEs face more barriers in their marketing operations since they have a lower amount of financial resources and assets. But the emergence of social media platforms has provided many chances for them to overcome these barriers by enabling them to do marketing and promotion activities. Although these social media channels are easy to access by each of their users, awareness, perceptions, capabilities of SMEs might differ when using these platforms. In this regard, this research aims to analyze and find out whether social media usage differs among SMEs regarding their age and size.  In parallel with this purpose, the researchers used an online questionnaire to collect data from 454 Czech SMEs. These SMEs were selected by applying a random sampling method and then an online questionnaire was directed to the respondents who were owners and managers of these enterprises. To analyze the data, the researchers performed an Independent T-test in SPSS statistical program. According to the results, social media usage does not differ between smaller-larger and younger-older SMEs. The reasons for these similarities among SMEs might stem from the industry that they operate, the cost of social media usage, and the age of younger firms’ executives. Nonexistence of the differences among analyzed Czech SMEs makes this paper differ from other studies. Some policy implementations are also offered by the researchers to increase awareness, skills, and usage of social media platforms by SMEs.


2018 ◽  
pp. 1072-1124
Author(s):  
Shalin Hai-Jew

With the popularization of the Social Web (or Read-Write Web) and millions of participants in these interactive spaces, institutions of higher education have found it necessary to create online presences to promote their university brands, presence, and reputation. An important aspect of that engagement involves being aware of how their brand is represented informally (and formally) on social media platforms. Universities have traditionally maintained thin channels of formalized communications through official media channels, but in this participatory new media age, the user-generated contents and communications are created independent of the formal public relations offices. The university brand is evolving independently of official controls. Ex-post interventions to protect university reputation and brand may be too little, too late, and much of the contents are beyond the purview of the formal university. Various offices and clubs have institutional accounts on Facebook as well as wide representation of their faculty, staff, administrators, and students online. There are various microblogging accounts on Twitter. Various photo and video contents related to the institution may be found on photo- and video-sharing sites, like Flickr, and there are video channels on YouTube. All this digital content is widely available and may serve as points-of-contact for the close-in to more distal stakeholders and publics related to the institution. A recently available open-source tool enhances the capability for crawling (extracting data) these various social media platforms (through their Application Programming Interfaces or “APIs”) and enables the capture, analysis, and social network visualization of broadly available public information. Further, this tool enables the analysis of previously hidden information. This chapter introduces the application of Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel (NodeXL) to the empirical and multimodal analysis of a university's electronic presence on various social media platforms and offers some initial ideas for the analytical value of such an approach.


Author(s):  
Vera Nsahlai ◽  
Refiloe Khoase ◽  
Patrick Ndayizigamiye ◽  
Shopee M. Dube

This chapter investigates the extent of digital marketing usage in South Africa, its perceived impact, and factors that influence its adoption in the South African context. The methodology adopted is the systematic review using the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) framework. The results show that digital platforms currently used include mobile marketing (SMS) and social media platforms. The findings suggest that SMS-based marketing may be appealing to other market segments but not to young adults. The findings further suggest that social media marketing has had a significant influence on the purchase intentions among South African millennials (Generation Y). Moreover, the findings suggest that marketers, in their quest to influence customer purchasing decisions, should consider the knowledge that social media followers have regarding a subject matter (such as a product), and make an effort to educate those followers on the subject (or product) before suggesting a purchase.


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