Factors Influencing Entrepreneurs’ Behavioral Intention to Adopt Social Media Marketing in Ethiopia
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2019-10
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
A.A.U.
Abstract
Social media has become a new trend for youngsters and businesses today. Tools and methods
for communicating customers have changed greatly with the revelation of social media and it
has become a vehicle that marketers can extend their marketing campaigns to a wider range of
consumers. The purpose of this study is to discover the factors affecting the initial response of
entrepreneurs in Ethiopia regarding behavioral intention when adopting social media
marketing. To determine what can influence entrepreneurs’ behavioral intention to adopt social
media marketing, A ‘Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology’ (UTAUT) were used
as the theoretical framework to investigate the adoption level of social media marketing as a
platform among Ethiopian entrepreneurs. The four key predictor factors that influence the
acceptance of social media as a business platform are performance expectancy, effort
expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions. A quantitative, cross-sectional research
design was adopted. The research applied a descriptive study in a quantitative research
approach based on primary data. A questionnaire with 29 items was developed to collect
primary data, hence 246 questionnaires were collected. To collect the data required, an online
survey has been distributed to online entrepreneurs in Ethiopia through different social media
and e-mail by Google drive form software. Assumption and diagnostic tests were done to ensure
the appropriateness of data to the assumptions of regression analysis, and multiple linear
regressions were also applied to test the proposed hypotheses. In the end, social influence was
found as a nominative determinant of entrepreneurs’ behavioral intention to adopt social media
marketing while facilitating conditions, effort expectancy and performance expectancy were also
found to have positive significant association towards entrepreneurs’ behavioral intention to
adopt social media marketing. These findings provide several managerial and theoretical
implications, namely the ways in which behavioral intention to adopt social media marketing is
needed as taken into consideration to increase social media marketing adoption. Moreover, this
study’s research model can be used for future studies on social media marketing.
Description
A Thesis Submitted to Addis Ababa University School of Graduate
Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Business Administration (MBA)
Keywords
Behavioral Intention, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media