Social media in the service of social entrepreneurship: Identifying factors for better services

Abstract

Social media presence becomes phenomenal at the beginning of the 21st century and currently, social media is the forefront agenda for many enterprises. The influence of social media is also dominant in social entrepreneurship with the ever-increasing influence of the social media. The emergence of social media has changed the way social entrepreneurs undertake their entrepreneurial activities by helping social enterprises to gain access to resources that were otherwise not available to them. Currently, social entrepreneurs are increasingly relying on social media applications such as Facebook, YouTube, Blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. to reach diverse audiences, generate more opportunities and promote their entrepreneurial ventures. As a result, it is becoming essential for social entrepreneurs to understand the vital role of social media and how they affect their social enterprises. Despite the fact that social media are being adopted by a growing number of social entrepreneurs, their understandability of how implementing social media may impact their entrepreneurial ventures is still limited because of the diverse possibilities of implementing them into their social enterprises. As a result, still limited scholarly studies have been undertaken so far which explain how social media could benefit entrepreneurial firms. To our knowledge, research which examines the role of social media in social entrepreneurship is scarce if not unavailable. This research provides a detailed literary investigation on current literature on social media and social entrepreneurship. A conceptual framework which depicts the role of social media in social entrepreneurship is developed. Furthermore, an extensive research on the different technology adoption theories and frameworks was conducted in order to identify key factors of social media for social entrepreneurial adoption. A social media adoption model has been proposed that depicts the adoption steps and which also integrates the identified factors as the key for the adoption process. This research provides valuable insights on the role of social media in social entrepreneurship and the social media adoption process in social enterprises. The findings of this research can be used by social entrepreneurs to facilitate social media adoption process in their entrepreneurial ventures and also can be used by academics for further research. The analysis shows that intention to return home induces remittances in terms of amount per year and proportion to income. Having further considered the determinants to return home of workers, income and employment satisfaction seem not to significantly affect their decisions as hypothesized. On the other hand, they are preferably satisfied in legal issues particularly visa regulations and labor protection and they became important negative factors of intention to return. Furthermore, international agreement and some legal instruments such as Agreement between Thailand and Australia for the Avoidance of Double Taxation and the Prevention of Fiscal Evasion with Respect to Taxes on Income, Fair Work Act 2009 and Labor Protection Act B.E. 2541, are also used to deepen the understanding of the economic outcome.