ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS IN PENETRATION OF INTERNATIONAL MARKETS BY SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES IN KENYA: A CASE OF SMALL BUSINESSES AT YAYA CENTRE NAIROBI COUNTY

Abstract

By making use of electronic media and social networks, the ways of doing businesses by many SMEs in Kenya has rapidly changed and evolved. New business ventures are budding because of globalisation and this has lead to abolition of geographical barriers. Social media networks allow a business to be where the customers are. The sites rely on the habitual presence of millions of users. From the young to the elderly generations, most people spend many hours daily on sites like Face book and Twitter, watching videos on YouTube, sharing photos on Flicker and instagram among others. This helps most users to be informed about the products and services offered by a particular business online either in the same geographical position or overseas and means in which they can be able to access the products or services. This study therefore sought to investigate whether the Kenyan Small and Medium Enterprises have followed suit to this globalization trend and whether there were tangible benefits attached to this new mode of doing business. This study used descriptive statistics and targeted a population of 65 respondents operating SMEs at Yaya centre in Nairobi. The study concluded that the benefits of social media for internationalization include the huge exposure that company can generate, the relatively low costs associated with it, the possibilities for customer segmentation and targeting it provides and the market insight that can be gained from analyzing consumers’ online behaviour and interacting with them through social networks. For SMEs to full use social media networks in their business, the government needs to increase the diffusion of internet infrastructure and hardware required for accessing the internet. Diffusion could help SMEs in developing countries to gain access to social media networks, internationalize and this would ultimately lead to tremendous performance