Investigating the power of social media in enhancing the brand reputation of SME's

Abstract

The motivation behind this research was to become aware of the impact that social media has on enhancing the brand reputation of SME’s Within Donegal. This research makes a worthwhile contribution to the development of brand reputation strategy through social media for SME’s. The research approach taken represents both a descriptive and an exploratory research design. A Mixed method approach was adapted for the research. The research process involved 10 semi-structured interviews with owner managers of SME’s. Depth interviews were used to explore the key issues related to social media and brand reputation. Ten customer surveys from each of the SME’s participating were conducted. Alongside this 150 online interviews were conducted with general consumers. Surveys were used to examine the views of consumers in relation to the brand reputation of SME’s through social media. From this all opinions, perceptions and experiences were analysed and findings were produced. The key findings of the research uncovered, namely that using social media to enhance the brand reputation of an SME is a viable option. The perceived advantages and disadvantages with using social media to enhance brand reputation were explored. Following this the researched discovered the extent to which SME’s within Donegal used social media to enhance brand reputation. From this the most effective tools for the different industries were established along with a set of guidelines for SME’s wishing to use social media to enhance brand reputation. The implications of these findings is that the research allows for a better understanding of the current situation of using social media to enhance brand reputation within SME’s in Donegal and efforts can therefore be made to increase social media and branding activity within these companies in order to enhance their brand reputation. The mixed method research carried out enables for further research on a national basis to be carried out in the future