COVID-19 and SME Adoption of Social Media in Developing Economies in Africa

Abstract

This chapter explores how COVID-19 negatively impacted society and small-medium enterprises (SMEs) and how social media marketing, promoting, and influencing played a role in rescuing and resuscitating some of the SMEs during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter investigates the use of social media during the hard lockdown due to mitigation measures of COVID-19. It uses a desktop review of literature to qualitatively identify themes. The study aim was to understand how social media could be used by SMEs to improve and grow SMEs. The study identified five key themes during COVID-19, being social media adoption, employees layoffs, falling customer demand, government support, and online business adoption. The social media influencing is being adopted as part of social media marketing, and one of its positives is that it is affordable. The richness of data and literature could lead to the development of a conceptual framework for the use of social media by SMEs in Africa.