I heart you: how businesses are using social media to increase social capital

Brad McKenna, Shahper Vodanovich, Tania Fan

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

17 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The popularity of social media is increasing as more social media platforms are produced. Businesses have seen the potential for social media and have changed their business strategies to suit this change. Social media allows businesses to communicate and provide awareness to their customers about offerings. It also provides a good platform for individuals or customers to communicate to the business on how they are operating, their views on products or services. The research problem we address in this study is with this amount of freedom to share information through social media, we need an understanding of the considerations of how businesses maintain social capital and social trust. This paper presents a preliminary study which explores the effectiveness of how businesses maintain good social capital. This study uses primary data collected from interviews with businesses about their social media use with their customers. The preliminary results show that businesses do understand the importance of maintaining a high social capital within social media. This paper contributes to the social capital theory literature within the context of social media usage by organisations, and thus the results may also provide some practical guidance organisations.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 2016
EventEuropean, Mediterranean & Middle Eastern Conference on Information Systems (EMCIS) - Krakow, Poland
Duration: 23 Jun 201624 Jun 2016

Conference

ConferenceEuropean, Mediterranean & Middle Eastern Conference on Information Systems (EMCIS)
Country/TerritoryPoland
CityKrakow
Period23/06/1624/06/16

Cite this