An Empirical Study of the Impact of SNS Market Orientation on Business Performances

Abstract

Today, industries heavily utilize social network services (SNS) as both an organizational communication tool and a marketing communication tool. However, little empirical research has been conducted about SNS’ impact on business performance from a marketing viewpoint. This study initially adapted “marketing orientation” into a SNS context as a theoretical framework. The market orientation basically pays attention to how efficiently firms gather and generate market information, and then disseminate the obtained market intelligence across departments, organization-wide. Through this flow of information, highly market-oriented firms achieve better business performance. Taking the theoretical background and the lack of empirical research about the impact of SNS on business performance into consideration, this study did an empirical inquiry to investigate the impact of a marketing orientation using SNS on business performance by executing a survey, followed by a structural equation modeling analysis. The analysis results showed that, first, SNS is a successful marketing tool for gathering market intelligence externally and disseminating it internally in business organizations. The positive relationship between market orientation obtained via SNS and business performance has been also confirmed in the SNS context, as reported in the previous literature. Second, this study found that market orientation, generated and disseminated via internal and external SNS usage, directly increased knowledge management and acculturation, which social capital acquired via SNS. Interestingly, knowledge management and acculturation did not directly influence business performance in a business organizational setting. Consequently, this research is meaningful in that it provided understanding about an overall mechanism for market orientation via SNS, knowledge management and acculturation via SNS, and business performance, from a holistic viewpoint. Finally, this research provided future study directions and some managerial implications about strategic uses of SNS in a business organization.