The impact of social media on small scale businesses

Abstract

The objective of the study was to study the impact of social media on small scale businesses. In other words, it aimed at finding out how social media usage affects marketing, the performance of the organization, information accessibility and customer relations. The study used primary data and was collected using google forms on a sample of 100 respondents. The analysis was done using Cochran’s formula (1963), chi square and ordinal logistic regression. In the results, I found out that 69.31% of my respondents had good profits due to the use of social media, majority of the respondents’ small scale businesses grew due to the use of social media, 70.3% of the respondents’ market for their products expanded and 56.44% of my respondents agree that the usage of social media has enabled them improve on their customer relations. In the bivariate analysis, it was found out that there is a significant relationship between social media usage and growth of the profits of the business, growth of the business, access to information concerning the business after social usage respectively. While social media is most likely to affect the use of social media for marketing according to the multivariate analysis. Therefore, there is a need to have policy interventions designed to encourage the use of social media and embrace the special characteristics of small firms at government and learning institutions levels. Small firms should therefore be encouraged to share social media experience among themselves and in collaboration with higher learning institutions that are actively conducting research. This will help SMEs to better understand and use social media to foster their growth.