Attitudes of small and medium-sized businesses towards social media marketing (A practice in Sakarya province)

Along with social media applications that have become an integral part of our lives, each of us shares everything we think, do, buy, sell, like or dislike through these applications. With these shares we share, it has become easier for businesses to reach our thoughts about their products. It is possible to see that traditional marketing has also changed with social media applications where two-way communication is provided. In this research, the use of social media marketing by businesses has become widespread and it has been possible to reach consumers through it, solve problems in the fastest way and share the goodies as soon as possible. From the point of view of consumers, it is seen that the use of social media marketing is widespread and preferred. However, we can also state through a small number of partially conducted studies that there is no generally accepted practice regarding the perspectives of small and medium-sized enterprises, which are accepted as the basic building block of the country, on social media marketing. In this research, the aim of the research is to determine whether small and medium-sized businesses operating in Sakarya use social media marketing as a marketing method in their businesses and to reveal their attitudes about social media marketing. The universe of the study consisted of small and medium-sized enterprises operating in Sakarya province. Although the study was planned to be carried out in 2021, it was completed in 2022 due to the fact that the pandemic process started to partially recover and businesses were in the process of keeping up with the changes. Within the scope of the research, the data were collected by the survey method, which is one of the quantitative analysis methods. Although the research was sent to many enterprises, feedback was obtained from 207 participants and the analyzes were made through the SPSS program. Frequency and chi-square analyzes were applied to the data and the validity of the research was tested. As a result of the study, it was determined that 53.6% of the SMEs in Sakarya carried out social media marketing activities and their attitudes towards social media marketing were positive. In addition, as a result of the research, it has been determined that social media marketing is a very important marketing tool for SMEs, regardless of the size of the SMEs in terms of sector, duration of activity or number of employees.