Impact of Social Media Usage on Organizational Performance in the Jordanian Dead Sea Cosmetic Sector

Abstract

Due to the current debate on the positives and negatives of social media, most of the organizations are in an unclear state regarding the adoption of social media. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to extend previous research on social media use comprising three variables: social media for marketing, social media for customer's relations and services, and social media for information accessibility and its impact on organizational performance in terms of rapid adaptation, time to market, cost reduction, and innovation in Jordan. The paper analyzed data obtained from a sample of 169 managers working at 23 different organizations in Dead Sea cosmetic sector in Jordan using a quantitative approach. Structural equation modelling used to test the hypotheses. Results showed that there is a strong positive impact of implementing and using social media on organizational performance in terms of rapid adaptation, cost reduction, and innovation. Also, social media usage is different among the companies' characteristics in terms of type, age, and size. This paper offers a clearer understanding of the importance of social media and its benefits. Also, this paper is one of the first studies conducted in Jordan and especially within the Dead Sea cosmetic sector by demonstrating the different areas of organizational performance that can be enhanced by using social media in different ways.

Social media usage and competitive advantage of nascent agro-allied firms

“…Descriptive analysis was carried out to determine the demographic spread of the respondents. The result in Table 1 indicates that male participants were two hundred and forty-three (243) accounting for 92% of the respondents, while females were twenty-two (22) that is 8% of the respondents. The age distribution shows that a greater percentage of managers of nascent firms in the agro-allied sector are young adults 20-30 years old with one hundred and ninety-eight (198) accounting for (75%) of the total respondents.…”

“…SM adoption for some businesses has been fast and for others, it has been gradual (Garcia-Morales et al, 2018). However, most businesses, if not all today, depend on SM to drive their communication needs, share information, and gather reliable data that could be as words, pictures, or videos (Dodokh & Al-Maaitah, 2019).…”

“…With this, the location was measured and was formulated as a dummy variable by coding 1 as rural location and 0 as urban. The manager's years of experience with the industry were adopted as the age (Dodokh & Al-Maaitah, 2019;Cooper et al, 1994). The manager's previous knowledge of agri-business before establishing the firm was coded as 1 and no previous knowledge of the agri-business before starting was coded as 0 and considering the variables were time-invariant, an effort was made to collect them at the first contact.…”

“…Hence, nascent farms must gain new knowledge and this can be gained through information gathering, and social media usage (SMU) has been found to provide businesses with relevant information (Balkrishna & Deshmukh, 2017). Two reasons could be advanced for this inconsistency, which are the limited perspectives on the different purposes of social media (SM) (Dodokh & Al-Maaitah, 2019;Schultz et al, 2012) and the existence of other factors that account for the relationship. This could explain the scholarly call for more research and the need to shift away from continually discussing principles of SM and redirect attention to identify the drivers and moderators that could account for SMU influence on the organizational outcome (Al Tawara & Gide, 2017; Tajvidi & Karami, 2017; Kim et al, 2015).…”

The Impact of Social Media Technologies on Supplier and Customer Relationship Management: An Empirical Analysis in the U.S.

“…Examples of popular social media platforms in the industry include Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Ning, and Igloo. Previous research has shown that social media can be used to improve financial performance [39], [40], organizational learning [41], [42], employee performance [43], [44], and innovation [14], [45]. Rodriguez et al [46] claimed that social media positively guided customer orientation activities and ultimately affected sales and business performance.…”