Abstract

     Social media has been taken as an important marketing tool for business today and it has also become increasingly imperative for marketers of SMEs to strategically utilize to attain competitive advantage and excellent performance. However, scholarly research on the social media marketing strategy of SMEs is still scant. To fill this research gap, this study proposes a social media marketing strategy framework for SMEs using customer knowledge management. The research captures the knowledge about customer by text mining and knowledge from customer by the Kano model revealing the critical requirements that will be used for the development of the social media marketing strategy framework, referred to as knowledge for customer. The strategy framework consists of the five common components for SMEs to conduct social media marketing which are Context, Channel, Content, Communication and Continuity. The study offers valuable insight into social media marketing improvement and customer knowledge management in enterprises.

Introduction

     Social media provides opportunities for businesses to improve their competitive position through interactive and cocreative ways [1], and this has made social media widely adopted as a business tool [2]. Social media has been playing a significant role in marketing strategy nowadays [3]. Despite the high adoption rate of social media, the actual usage in enterprises often seems to be improvised and lacks a clear strategy [4]. And enterprises apply their social media marketing strategies guided by only intuition or trial and scant research has systematically integrated and expanded knowledge on social media marketing strategies [5] [6]. Especially in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), due to relatively insufficient human or financial resources compared to large companies [7], the social media workers with relatively lower competency lack the strategy to conduct work, leading to poor performance of social media marketing. SMEs’ usual lack of human capital restrains their internal drive of knowledge, Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) becomes a strategic approach in order to create customer value [8]. This study proposes a strategy framework that identifies and classifies the components of social media marketing to guide SMEs’ marketing activities by using customer knowledge management.

Findings

     The study develops a social media marketing strategy framework using customer knowledge management. The results would be organized into the three types of customer knowledge.

Knowledge about Customer

The knowledge about customer is the critical issues extracted by text mining from customer feedback of SMEs social media marketing, as shown in Table V