An Investigation of Social Media Marketing in Saudi Arabia's SMEs

This research proposal investigates the effectiveness of social media marketing for small businesses in Saudi Arabia. It begins with a background on the increasing importance of social media in marketing, especially for reaching younger audiences. The proposal outlines the aim to investigate social media usage among small businesses and its effectiveness, with objectives focused on understanding the reasons for social media adoption and assessing its impact. A literature review highlights the current trends and benefits of social media marketing, particularly its cost-effectiveness and ability to compete with larger companies. The methodology section describes the use of an inductive, mixed-methods approach, including both qualitative and quantitative research methods such as surveys and case studies, to analyze social media trends and strategies. The expected outcomes suggest that social media marketing can be successful for small businesses in Saudi Arabia. The study aims to contribute to the understanding of how social media can be leveraged to enhance business performance in the region.

Running head: RESEARCH PROPOSAL ON SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Research Proposal on Social Media Marketing
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1RESEARCH PROPOSAL ON SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Background
In recent time, with the evolvement of internet has encouraged the use of internet in the
marketing process of various products in recent times. The new form of communication in the
marketing process of products has reached to a different level. Nowadays, the trading through
internet has become very popular for all type of industry as most of the people are accustomed to
use social media nowadays. So it is quite easy to reach people with the new type of product
through the social media. In recent technological friendly world, the concept of social media
marketing is the top of the lists of various business organization (Adamopoulos and Todri 2015).
Most of the companies nowadays, are taking benefits from the social media platform like twitter,
YouTube, Facebook. As the youth people are mostly attached to various social media platform
so it is quite easy to reach to a huge amount of people through those social media platform. It
can be easily concluded that, the use of social media in the marketing of business has changed
the dynamics of marketing and this method has also enhanced the power of the consumer as they
have all kind of information regarding any new product in the market. The small business
enterprises has not considered this method as a part of their marketing tool yet (Abed, Dwivedi
and Williams 2015). Hence, in this research proposal, the researcher will try to focus on the
effectiveness of social media marketing for the small scale industry of Saudi Arabia. In this
proposal, the aims and objectives, methodology of the study, expected result of the studies are
discussed under a few headings.
Aim
The main of this research proposal is to investigate the use of social media marketing among the
small businesses in Saudi Arabia.

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Objectives
The objectives of this study are as follows.
 To investigate the reason of social media use by the small businesses
 To find out the effectiveness of social media marketing.
Research Questions
1) Why should the small business enterprises use social media as a part of their marketing?
2) How will the social media help the small businesses in Saudi Arabia?
Review of Literature
The use of social media in the process of marketing has become one of the most
important pasrt of the product marketing as youth generation are very much addicted to it. In a
current study it was observed that, the 93% of social media users believe that all the companies
of business industry should use social media as a part of the marketing of their product. In
addition, 85% of the users think that companies should interact through social media. Moreover,
nowadays in the world, most of the companies are using social media to form a close contact
with their customers through the use of social media. In addition, some companies are also
giving various attractive offers through the direct link in the Facebook and Twitter and this
suggest that importance of social media in the marketing of businesses (Abed, Dwivedi and
Williams 2016). So it can be said that, the small scale business in Saudi Arabia may use such
method of giving offers and this will help them to enhance their sell. Moreover, most of the
people will have knowledge about their product as well. As most of the cases the small
industries generally have very less amount capital, the use of social media will be very effective
for them as it is very cheap and a very little technical expertise is required to use it. Social media

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use will allow the small business industries to promote their products through the internet in a
cost-effective manner as well. The small business industry in Saudi Arabia by using the social
media not only enhance the condition of their own, but this use of social media will also help the
growth of the economy of Saudi Arabia (Helal 2017). According toAbuhashesh ( 2014), the
social media has given the opportunity to the customers to choose their product from a wide
variety of products. Not only to the customers, but also to the small businessmen the social
media use has given the opportunity to compete with the large companies by giving strategic
opportunity. The authors also find that, the use of social media tool requires a very little
investment and in addition they can also compete with the large multinational companies in an
effective way. By using this social media strategy, small business industry will be able to
establish relationship with the consumers of their product. With the traditional way, the small
business cannot have the accesses to reach to their customers directly as they do not have such
huge amount of capital. In the new method, the customers directly can interact with the small
businessmen through the social media page of the company. Another study by Abed, Dwivedi
and Williams (2016), also supported the use of social media use in the small business. So it can
be said that, if the small business industry will use the social media as a part of their marketing
tool, it may possible that this method will work effectively in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The
social media dependent business model can be used to enhance the customer interactivity and
customer connectivity. The small business companies will be able to realize the customer needs
and market value of various product by using the social media as a marketing tools. In addition ,
the customer can also interact with the company through the social media platform of the
particular small business company. Moreover, they can easily influence the customers through
various adopted new strategies and a new way of communication will also automatically attract

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the customers. As a part of this social media tools, small business companies can share
photographs of products, and related ideas in the social media. However, they need to identify
the strengths and weakness of the social media in order to make a comprehensive strategy. In
studies, it was observed that, most of the small business do not use social media as a part of their
marketing and the main reasons behind this rejection of social media use are lack of awareness,
telecommunication infrastructure, workforce and skilled workers, logistic capabilities. So, it can
be easily concluded from the findings of the previous studies that, the small business industries
actually need to use the social media platform as a part of their marketing process ( Alves,
Fernandes and Raposo2016).
Methodology
In this research method, the inductive research method will be used by the researcher in
which, the approach starts with collecting data and after analyzing the data the researcher will
conclude a decision from the result. In addition, as a research method, a mix method will be
used. A mix method refers to the application of both qualitative and quantitative research
method. A quantitative research tries to find the numerical outputs and from those data a
conclusion is extracted. A quantitative research approach generally includes numerical methods,
survey methods and laboratory experiments. On the other hand, a quantitative research is activity
that involves naturalistic and interpretive approach to the research(Bryman 2016). In this
research, the researcher will analyze the social trend in a specific context that is social media use
by the small business of Saudi Arabia like Zain Saudi Arabia. In addition, survey method also
will be used as a part of qualitative study by the researcher to compare the strategies with the
large companies like Saudi Telecom Company. A survey questionnaire will be developed and the
reliability of the study will be validated by using the Chronbach Alpha test. As the research is

5RESEARCH PROPOSAL ON SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
directly related to the business market, so analysis of various case studies will be very helpful in
this study. From the previous case studies, secondary data can be collected. As a part of the
survey method, structured interviews will be performed. Various studies showed that, the case
study strategy can be used in both qualitative and quantitative research. As the case study will be
analyzed as a part of the research, the researcher can investigate the case scenario in its original
context and the researcher will have clear idea about the social, political and other conditions that
are related to the market ( Creswell and Creswell 2014). So, it will be very effective to use this
research strategy in this research as analysis of the market condition is very crucial in this
research. In this study, only the small business companies will be included as a study population
and a random sampling technique will be used as sampling technique of this study.
Expected Outcome
From the previous study findings it can be said that, the use of social media will be
successful if the small scale business authorities use the social media platform as a marketing
tools. As various studies showed that, Facebook is very popular among the internet users and
most of the users spend at least 1-2 hours in the social media every day. It is also noted that, 24%
of social media exchange views regarding any product in the social media and most of them uses
social media before making any decision regarding product buying (Alves, Fernandes and
Raposo 2016). So, it can be easily concluded that, if the small business enterprisesin Saudi
Arabia use social media as a part of their marketing, it will help them in their business.

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Abed, S. S., Dwivedi, Y. K., and Williams, M. D., 2016. Social commerce as a business tool in
Saudi Arabia's SMEs. International Journal of Indian Culture and Business Management, 13(1),
1-19.
Abed, S.S., Dwivedi, Y.K. and Williams, M.D., 2015. SMEs' adoption of e-commerce using
social media in a Saudi Arabian context: a systematic literature review. IJBIS, 19(2), pp.159-179.
Abuhashesh, M.Y., 2014. Integration of Social Media in Businesses. International Journal of
Business and Social Science, 5(8).
Adamopoulos, P. and Todri, V., 2015, August. The effectiveness of marketing strategies in social
media: Evidence from promotional events. In Proceedings of the 21th ACM SIGKDD
International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (pp. 1641-1650). ACM.
Alves, H., Fernandes, C. and Raposo, M., 2016. Social media marketing: a literature review and
implications. Psychology & Marketing, 33(12), pp.1029-1038.
Bryman, A., 2016. Social research methods. Oxford university press.
Creswell, J.W. and Creswell, J.D., 2017. Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed
methods approaches. Sage publications.
Helal, M., 2017. An investigation of the use of social media for e-commerce amongst small
businesses in Saudi Arabia (Doctoral dissertation, University of Salford).
References