An Integrated Social Media Trading Platform for B40 Social Media Entrepreneurship

Statistically, there are 2.7 million Malaysian households categorized under the Bottom 40 (B40) category with 56% of them are living in urban areas and the remaining 44% live in rural areas. Malaysia’s Eleventh Malaysia Plan refers B40 as household with a mean monthly income of RM3,860. For the betterment of the B40 community in the country, the Government of Malaysia aims to double the B40 household incomes by Year 2020 and this is facilitated via various multisector initiatives, especially those championed by Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation [1]. It is observed by some studies that the younger generations in the B40 community are very exposed to the Internet and social technologies in general. They use social media application as a medium for many activities including interacting with family and friends, organizing events, for learning purposes, purchasing and selling products online, and thus becoming B40 social entrepreneurs themselves. Leveraging on this phenomenon, this paper proposes the development of an integrated social media trading platform which combines many popular social media such as Facebook and Instagram into a single platform that will be offered to the B40 social entrepreneur community in Malaysia to conduct their businesses on this platform. The integrated trading platform will cover a broad set of features such as storefront, payment, shipping, after sales service, customer management, and advisory from mentor. The integrated platform is also designed to enable the B40 social entrepreneurs to understand their customers better through sentiment analysis and social media analytics to boost their social entrepreneurship.