کد مقاله | کد نشریه | سال انتشار | مقاله انگلیسی | نسخه تمام متن |
---|---|---|---|---|
350715 | 618455 | 2014 | 8 صفحه PDF | دانلود رایگان |
• New understanding about use, potential and challenges of social media in B2Bs external use.
• Better understanding of special challenges and features of B2B-related social media.
• Discovered social media use between different company sizes and turnover similar.
• Found a number of external social media uses that were seen as important by B2Bs.
• Found statistically significant correlations between social media use and potential.
Even today, it is a fairly common argument in business-to-business companies, especially in traditional industrial companies, that social media is only useful in the business-to-consumer sector. The perceived challenges, opportunities and social media use cases in business-to-business sector have received little attention in the literature. Therefore, this paper focuses on bridging this gap with a survey of social media use cases, opportunities and challenges in industrial business-to-business companies. The study also examines the essential differences between business-to-consumer and business-to-business in these respects. The paper starts by defining social media and Web 2.0, and then characterizes social media in business, and social media in business-to-business. Finally, we present and analyze the results of our empirical survey of 125 business-to-business companies in the Finnish technology industry sector. This paper suggests that there is a significant gap between the perceived potential of social media and social media use with customers and partners in business-to-business companies, and identifies potentially effective ways to reduce the gap.
Journal: Computers in Human Behavior - Volume 30, January 2014, Pages 606–613