The publication explaining how social media are profoundly transforming marketing practices and why this matters for Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in developing countries – provides background information on the origins of social media; reviews main tools and methods such as blogging, social networks including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+, and content sharing methods; discusses importance and benefits of using social media by exporting SMEs; suggests that strategies need to be developed to take advantage of social media in the export-marketing context and describes how to design such strategies; discusses how to measure the impact that investment in social media has on the business, offers a set of indicators and targets, and the ways to measure performance; includes examples from various social media platforms and case studies from selected developing countries.
Authors: Mark Hillary and Thomas Hess
Publisher: International Trade Centre (ITC)
Year: 2014