An Empirical Study of the Impact of SNS Market Orientation on Business Performances

Today, industries heavily utilize social network services (SNS) as both an organizational communicationtool and a marketing communication tool. However, little empirical research has been conducted about SNS’impact on business performance from a marketing viewpoint. This study initially adapted “marketingorientation” into a SNS context as a theoretical framework. The market orientation basically pays attention tohow efficiently firms gather and generate market information, and then disseminate the obtained marketintelligence across departments, organization-wide. Through this flow of information, highly market-orientedfirms achieve better business performance. Taking the theoretical background and the lack of empiricalresearch about the impact of SNS on business performance into consideration, this study did an empiricalinquiry to investigate the impact of a marketing orientation using SNS on business performance by executinga survey, followed by a structural equation modeling analysis. The analysis results showed that, first, SNS isa successful marketing tool for gathering market intelligence externally and disseminating it internally inbusiness organizations. The positive relationship between market orientation obtained via SNS and businessperformance has been also confirmed in the SNS context, as reported in the previous literature. Second, thisstudy found that market orientation, generated and disseminated via internal and external SNS usage, directlyincreased knowledge management and acculturation, which social capital acquired via SNS. Interestingly,knowledge management and acculturation did not directly influence business performance in a businessorganizational setting. Consequently, this research is meaningful in that it provided understanding about anoverall mechanism for market orientation via SNS, knowledge management and acculturation via SNS, andbusiness performance, from a holistic viewpoint. Finally, this research provided future study directions andsome managerial implications about strategic uses of SNS in a business organization.