The Relationship between Social Media Marketing and SMEs Performance in Nigeria: A Systemic Literature Review

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Lawal Abideen Ayokunmi, Noor Aslinda Abu Seman, Umi Kartini Rashid

Abstract

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are considered as a vibrant and dynamic sector of the world economy including Nigeria. Small and medium scale enterprises prefer the use of social media marketing because of its ability to connect with many potential consumers at a time, low cost, ease of use, and technical manageability. Hence, social media marketing is rapidly growing among businesses and is currently considered a major key to enhancing a better performance. Thus, this paper provides a systematic literature review (SLR) of previous research studies on social media marketing and SMEs performance in Nigeria. In this work, the research procedure focuses on the subject matters related to social media, marketing, SMEs, and performance, which are selected from three major digital databases, namely Scopus, ScienceDirect, and Web of Science.  The study selection process consists of research into two factors; i) literature sources, articles, and journal publications between the years 2014 to 2020; and ii) that investigate the direction of the study of SMEs performance in the context of social media marketing. The articles were screened, filtered and duplicates were excluded, followed by the reading of the full-text articles. The final included result is 65 articles, which will be adopted in this study. From the previous results, most studies applied a quantitative approach which is the most popular research method. But this SLR study discovered social media marketing strongly affects the performance of SMEs worldwide and particularly in Nigeria. Therefore, this study suggests that social media marketing studies should be given adequate concentration. The government should cater for financial assistance with a low-interest rate for SME entrepreneurs. Furthermore, this SLR recommends that researchers should investigate and focus more on the effective use of social media marketing in the context of SME performance.

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