Understanding the Factors Impacting Social Media Adoption

With fast growing numbers of their target customers using social media, organizations can no longer ignore social media. Increasingly, companies are adopting social media in their business strategies, especially focusing on their customers. From the perspective of research, it is important to understand what factors are driving organizations to adopt social media in their business, especially marketing, which is the first level of customer contact. Based on the review of past research in the field of social media and theoretical frameworks of Uses and Gratification, Technology Adoption Model and Technology-Organization-Environment, this paper identifies the key factors of Social Media Interaction (SMI), Social Media Communication (SMC), Social Media Leadership (SML) and Social Media Perceived Usefulness (SMPU) which may impact social media adoption. A conceptual model using these factors is also presented which can be researched further for confirmation of the impact of these factors on social media adoption.