Exploring Social Media Marketing Strategies in SMEs

Social media marketing (SMM) appears to be especially advantageous for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) due to their greater flexibility and higher need to contain marketing communications costs. Most of the existing theoretical and applied research on SMM in SMEs is case-based and anecdotal, describing best practices, innovations, and experiments with fan pages, Twitter parties, and designer contests. However, with increasing adoption of social media by businesses and their growing experiences with "muddling through" various tactics and techniques, it appears possible to identify the emerging consistencies, and classify these recurring patterns into managerially relevant strategic types. This paper develops a taxonomy of social media strategies in SMEs based on cluster analysis of self-reported SMM usage data by 116 marketing executives. It also explores the relationships between company characteristics and cluster membership, and assesses association of each inductively identified strategic approach with performance indicators. The hierarchical cluster analysis optimized at a threecluster solution for both the 2009 and 2010 sub-samples, confirming the stability and reliability of the selected clustering variable for arriving at unique clusters.