Barriers to social enterprises’ adoption of social media marketing in developing countries

Marketing safeguards sustainability through supporting cooperative and collaborative interactions between businesses and stakeholders. Social media (SM) marketing can be described as an innovative and groundbreaking business practice. Adopting SM marketing is one of the vital strategic challenges facing the social enterprise (SE) sector to access the international market, improve networking, gain competitive advantage, and obtain valuable global market intelligence. There has been almost no research into SM usage in social types of enterprises. This research aims to shed light on the issues that influence Bangladeshi SEs in their adoption of SM for business purposes. The aim is to understand why they need to adopt this relatively new technological phenomenon. This is achieved by recognising the difficulties and challenges that SEs face and the benefits they experience once they have embraced SM. Using the technology–organisation–environment framework and a social constructionist perspective, 22 in-depth interviews were conducted with individuals from SEs. The emergent data were analysed using thematic analysis. Analysis suggests there is a low level of SM marketing engagement among SEs. Lack of technological knowledge, security, trust, and support, and a deficiency in resources are among the main challenges. One interesting finding was that all participants were aware of the benefits that SM can provide, but the challenges hinder adoption. This study’s conceptual model can improve stakeholders’ considerations of why some SEs prefer to implement SM technologies, while others have not.