This study investigates the antecedents and impact of social media usage in organizations. This study uses the technology, organization, and environment framework and includes certain antecedent factors that are specific to social media usage in organizations. The items to measure different purposes of social media usage in organizations were developed, which contribute to the enhancement of social media usage measurement. This study develops and tests an integrated model that contributes to the scholarly research on social media and information systems. The study also helps organizations to understand the benefits of social media usage and provides a justification for investments in social media by organizations.

Introduction

Organizational usage of social media is changing organizational communication and public relations. Social media enables open communication, which helps organizations to understand customer needs and motivates them to respond proactively and efficiently to those needs [1]. For any technology to be successful and to have an impact on organizational performance, it has to be properly adopted by organizations. As many organizations invest in social media, it is important to identify the factors that are associated with the successful adoption of these technologies. Past theoretical and empirical evidence revealed that the technology, organization, and environment (TOE) framework has been a popular model in examining various information systems (IS) issues. Empirical findings from the studies that used the TOE framework confirmed that it is a valuable framework with which to understand the adoption of IT innovation [2]. Previous studies using the TOE framework have investigated many factors and found these factors as antecedents for various IS usage [3]. But unlike any other IT innovations or Internet-based systems, social media is a more open and public-oriented system, which has both advantages and disadvantages. Hence, there may be other technological, organizational, and environmental factors that are more specific to social media that might affect its adoption in organizations. To fill these gaps in the literature and to develop an overarching framework that delineates the antecedents and benefits of social media usage in organizations, we rely on the TOE framework. This research aims to study the factors associated with the technological, organizational, and environmental context that relates to social media usage in organizations as the extent to which social media benefits organizations is still not clear. Therefore, this study also investigates the benefits associated with social media usage in organizations. Moreover, most of the previous IS studies measured system usage including social media usage based on frequency and duration of use only [4]. There have been calls to examine the usage construct in detail and investigate different patterns of IS usage behaviors in organizations [5]. However, Henri et al. [6] stated that theoretical advances in this regard are still insufficient. Therefore, this study aims to develop measures for social media usage using the system-centered method, which could measure different purposes of social media usage in organizations.