Small Steps, Big Impact: Conceptualising the Adoption of Social Media Marketing in Bangladesh's SMEs

1. Introduction

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are organisations with income, resources, or staff quantities below a specific level. SMEs are independent, non-subsidiary businesses with less than a certain number of staff (Kharlamov et al., 2022). This number modifies from country to country. As in the European Union, the maximum limit for determining an SME is 250 staff. Nevertheless, other nations define the maximum at 200 workers, but the United States classifies SMEs as businesses with fewer than 500 employees (Berisha & Pula, 2015). SMEs play a crucial role in the economy, employing a large number of people and contributing to innovation. The definition of SMEs varies from country to country.

In the context of Bangladesh, In the manufacturing sectors of SMEs, a medium enterprise is one with assets between USD 14 million and USD 42 million and 100 to 250 employees. In the service sector, medium-sized enterprises have 50 to 100 people and assets between USD 0.1 and USD 2.1 million. In the manufacturing industry, a small business is one with assets between USD7,000 and USD1,400,000 and between 25 and 99 employees. In the service sector, small businesses have 10 to 25 employees and assets between USD 7000 and USD 1.4 million (Rahman et al., 2019). SMEs support the growing economy of Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, SMEs have become a significant source of employment. About 24 million people are employed by the industry, with 23 per cent working for manufacturing SMEs (The Business Standard, 2021). The contribution of small and medium-sized enterprises to the gross domestic product is just 20.25 per cent, which is relatively low compared to other rising countries. The SME Foundation is looking to increase the contribution of the SME sector to the country's GDP to over 35% by 2030. In addition, 99.93% of Bangladesh's businesses are small and medium-sized firms, whereas just 0.07% are huge organisations (The Business Standard, 2021). There are about 7,900,000 SMEs in Bangladesh, of which 93.6% are small firms and 6.4% are medium enterprises. The emergence of the digital era has had a profound impact on the business environment. As one of the most significant aspects of the current business environment, the technical environment and information and communication technology have impacted the expansion of several company domains. Social media is regarded as one of the essential components of information and communication technology that significantly influences a business (Qalati et al., 2021). In this regard, it is vital to evaluate if social media usage can assist small and medium business firms in their overall development. Few studies are studying how social media usage can enhance the overall operations of SMEs.