The Impact of Social Media Usage on Marketing Performance via Innovation: An Empirical Study on Service Firms in Egypt

Passent Tantawi ,Heba Sadek

doi:10.7176/jaas/75-03

Abstract

With the growing intensified competition and development of the service sector, innovation has become vital dimension for firms to enjoy competitive advantages and yield positive outcomes on the economy. The use of social media (SM) as one of the service firm communication tools fosters innovation and has always been of critical importance to both academia and practice. Thus, this study focuses on the impact of SM usage based on both knowledge exploration and exploitation on the marketing performance via the most widely accepted four innovation types in past literature, which consist of product, process, marketing and organizational innovation in the Egyptian private service sector. Questionnaires were distributed electronically to gather data. Data gathered from 385 private service firms from the top management level. Data has been analyzed via Structural Equation Modelling (SEM), AMOS 22. Results indicated that SM usage has a significant positive direct impact on all types of innovation with varying relative effects. Additionally, it has been found that marketing innovation played the greatest direct and positive impact on the marketing performance, followed by the product innovation, however, the process innovation has been found to have negative impact on the marketing performance. While the organizational innovation does not directly impact the marketing performance. This study contributes to the literature by highlighting on the SM usage and the vital types of innovation that lead to higher marketing performance in the service sector which needs more attention from service marketing managers. Also, this study helps the service providers in the private service firms to focus on the significance role of SM in exploring and exploiting knowledge especially from customers to innovate in a better way to consequently enhance the marketing performance. Keywords: social media, innovation, marketing performance, service sector, Egypt DOI: 10.7176/JAAS/75-03 Publication date: August 31 st 2021

Highlights

The business environment has been undergoing vibrant changes over the past twenty years especially with the use of social media (SM) and innovation (Freixanet et al, 2021)
A quantitative study has been conducted to examine the impact of social media usage on marketing performance via innovation in the private service sector in Egypt where there is a severe market competition from one side and from the other side, innovativeness in services is connected with their growing role in the economy
All industries across the entire service sector are recognizing the critical role of innovation in improving their performances at general

Summary

Introduction

The business environment has been undergoing vibrant changes over the past twenty years especially with the use of social media (SM) and innovation (Freixanet et al, 2021). Innovation has been an indicator for success for business firms, affecting the business and marketing performance and driving the firm’s growth (Aksoy, 2017). The growth and progressing of the service sector urged firms to seize the innovation opportunities especially those with great social and economic effect. This has become an interest for scholars in the organizational research field (Ferraz & Santos, 2016). Service firms are increasingly recognizing the critical role played by innovation in the societal and economic progression (Ferraris et al, 2017). Innovation supports service firms in improving their performance, generally during the difficult time of Covid-19 crisis, and help them survive (Ando, 2021) and one of the unsurpassed and influential communication tools which leads to nurturing innovation is the SM usage (Mention et al, 2019)

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