Abstract—Social media adoption in social enterprises is at its infancy and related scholarly research is relatively scarce. In addition, social media adoption models/frameworks are still limited. The majority of social enterprises have already adopted or in the process of adopting social media although, they are still finding structural and functional difficulties in the implementation process. The main difficulties are in figuring out how to develop an effective social media adoption process. To our knowledge, the literature does not provide a concise and specific model/framework, which shows how social enterprises could adopt social media in their enterprises. The purpose of this paper is to come up with a model/framework that could help social enterprises with their social media adoption process, taking into consideration some of the parameters, which we believe, hinder such adoption in the existing models. The research examines existing social media adoption models, and identifies existing parameters and accordingly, introduces new parameters. In order to test the effectiveness and efficiency of a social media adoption model, it is essential to scrutinize the parameters affecting the adoption process. An extensive research was conducted on the existing models and different technology adoption theories and frameworks to identify the key parameters of the adoption process. Few social media adoption models were tested against these key parameters to figure out their efficiency and effectiveness. Finally, after detailed comparative analysis and testing, the research suggests that the proposed model adds value to existing research and could be adopted by social enterprises as a useful framework to help in their social media adoption process.

Index Terms—social media, social entrepreneurship, social media adoption, parameter in social media

Cite:Jamal El-Den, Pratap Adhikari, and Sami Azam, "A Model for Social Media Adoption in Social Enterprises: A Comparative Analysis with Existing Adoption Model" Journal of Advanced Management Science, Vol. 5, No. 6, pp. 467-473, November 2017. doi: 10.18178/joams.5.6.467-473