Purpose of social media usage of export enterprises- BAIB (Western Mediterranean Exporters Union) example

The subject of this research is to reveal export companies' purpose of using social media. In this study, it is aimed to find whether there is a relationship between many variables such as social media platforms used by export companies, social media usage frequencies, their intention for using social media, users' qualifications, usage statistics, and languages used with. Two important diffuculties for this research are limited use of social media and limited researches in this scope. These difficulties increase the importance of this thesis. In this study, 16 export companies registered to the Western Mediterranean Exporters Union is determined by « purposive sampling method» and in-depth interview technique is applied with structured interview form containing 33 questions. Every interview is recorded and then audio recordings are converted to written format. Quantitative data is obtained from answers to first 16 questions and evaluated with SPSS 21.0 and MS Excel. Qualitative data is obtained from other answers, coded by grouping word clouds and evaluated with Nvivo 12. According to the findings; social media is used for increasing the image of the company, finding new customers, marketing, managing customer relationship, managing human resources, exchanging opinions within the company, and doing R & D. Also, most commonly used social media platforms are Facebook, LindkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, You Tube and Pinterest respectively. Findings revealed that, Facebook is mostly used for increasing companies' image. On the other hand, Linkedin and Twitter is mostly used for finding distributors and marketing purposes.