Social media research in the context of emerging markets: An analysis of extant literature from information systems perspective

Despite the potential of social media in emerging markets (EMs), only a few studies published in high-quality information systems (IS) journals that have addressed issues related to social media in the context of EMs. The purpose of this paper is to analyse existing research related to social media published in high-quality IS journals for exploring initial research trends, emerging themes, limitations and future research directions in the context of EMs.

This study conducted a systematic review of 22 articles on social media, which were published in the “Senior Scholars Basket of IS Journals and Information Systems Frontiers” from 1997 to 2017. Manual literature search approach (i.e. screening through the table of contents of each journal) was employed to identify relevant articles. The content of relevant articles was systematically analysed and synthesised along with keyword analysis to understand research trends on social media related issues in the EMs context.

The study identified four major themes from existing research on the social media in the context of EMs, namely: social media frameworks; social media and consumers; social media and organisations; and social media and society with the majority of the studies focussing on consumers. A single subject was found as the major limitation with studies analysed focussing on single platform/country/domain hindering the generalisability whereas including a new exogenous variable to improve the validity of existing studies emerged as main future research direction.

This study conducted literature review on social media in EMs, which have not been undertaken yet. Moreover, it employed manual search (an effort and time-intensive approach) to overcome the shortcomings of keyword search to identify, locate, select and analyse the social media literature in the context of EMs.