Abstract:
Social media use within the business and branding spheres has exploded globally over the past few years. While Namibian SMEs are actively involved in social media marketing, there is a lack of deeper knowledge of audience analysis, campaign analytics and proper strategic planning for full benefit extraction. This is compounded by the relative lack of locally produced and published research within the field of social media that explicitly tackles the topic of analytics and social media strategy. Furthermore, existing frameworks present some challenges towards implementation, such as a lack of focus on contextual environmental advantages that might inform creative strategy. Through a literature review of existing platforms and research frameworks, we find that these existing frameworks do not take into account potential perceptions that may help or hamper their implementation among SMEs with differing levels of social media maturity. Guided by qualitative methods like focus groups and brand interventions, and bolstered by quantitative methods like secondary data analysis and public surveys, we find that issues of user perception, messaging presentation and placement are key themes that plague successful implementation and exploitation of social media strategy and analytics data for business intelligence. This research thus presents a better understanding of the local social media marketing and analytics environment, determines currently existing best practices among lager organizations, and uses this data to formalize a social media marketing and analytics framework for Namibian SMEs. The research takes on a pragmatic bent that complements the fast-evolving nature of social media, and theoretically contributes a novel, social-first adaptation of the popular DeLone & McLean Information System Success Model of IS research.
