Abstract:

Social media marketing is a phenomenon which has become an important aspect of the marketing mix and revolutionize the way companies interact with their customers. It is a new field of research and literature quick scan revealed that not many studies exist on social media marketing on SMEs in UAE. Quantitative methodology was employed in this research and 350 questionnaires were distributed to the target respondents and 245 were used for the analysis in this research work. SPSS and Smart-PLS were employed in data analysis. The findings indicate that email and twitter have negative effect on organisational culture while Facebook and WhatsApp showed positive effect. However, only the effect of twitter shows significant effect (β = -.606, t = 17.49, p = .000) while the remaining variables did not show any significant effect. Altogether, the four social media tools explained about 36 percent change in organisational culture. In addition, the effect of the four’s social media tools and SMEs performance indicated that Facebook have negative effect on SMEs performance even though the effect is not statistically significant. The most influential determinant of SMEs performance is shown to be organisational culture (β = .922, t = 40.70, p = .00), this is followed by WhatsApp which returned a significant effect (β = .193, t = 5.306, p = .000), overall, email, Facebook, twitter, WhatsApp and organisational culture collectively explain about 77 percent variation in SME performance.