Social Media Within Business: Furthering the Maturity Model Discussion.

Various maturity models exist for the use of social media (Kiron, et al., 2013) (Overby, 2012). However, this paper argues that they are not without limitation and draws from the strengths of two to present a new cohesive model. The purpose of this work is to develop a social media maturity model that represents the phases or stages of the use of social media and evaluates how organisations can effectively utilise social media to further their aims and objectives. Four objectives were pursued, namely to: Examine the main drivers for businesses engaging with social media; Critically evaluate literature related to maturity models as well as best practice for organisational use of social media to inform the proposal of a new maturity model; Investigate the current state of social media within businesses as well as the depth to which they are being used through the application of the proposed model; and recommend how businesses can apply the proposed maturity model and strategies for how they can progress through the various stages. To achieve these objectives an interpretivist, inductive philosophy was used to carry out an initial scan of the use of social media within the top 30 growing social enterprises as well as case studies with two of these organisations. We find that the primary objective for these organisations using social media is for improving engagement with customers and stakeholders. While the organisations that were selected were seen to be two of those frequently and effectively utilising these technologies and though there is disparity in the level of resources available to them, the work finds that both of these organisations mostly fall within the development phase of the proposed model and areas for growth remain. Finally, recommendations are made for how businesses can improve their use of social media and are presented in the form of an additional model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]