How social media applications affect B2B communication and improve business performance in SMEs

Social Media Apps (SMA) are widely used to facilitate individual communications. In company situations, they are utilized as a channel to communicate with their customers. However, studies examining how SMA have been utilized in the Business-to-Business (Social Media Benchmarking Report, 2014) context are lacking. Using a model based on Media Synchronicity Theory (MST), we present one of the first empirical studies investigating the relationship between the capabilities of SMA (transmission velocity, parallelism, symbol sets, rehearsability, and reprocessability) and B2B communication and business performance. Five case studies-based on face-to-face interviews with the senior managers/owners of SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) were conducted. The data were analyzed and the findings confirmed the SMA media capabilities as explained by MST. The findings also revealed a missing SMA capability, that of information security and control, which has been added to the proposed model and which may be an important addition to MST. This study calls for more research to verify this finding. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.