Social Media and Knowledge Sharing. The Impact on Social Value Creation and Organisational Performance of UK Social Enterprises

Abstract

Governments and society are looking, increasingly, to specialist organisations such as social enterprises to address complex social problems, leading to a rise in their numbers. These organisations regularly access difficult to reach, disadvantaged and disenfranchised communities and tend to be smaller in size and turnover than for-profit commercial organisations and typically more resource limited. The growth in corporate social responsibility and individual citizenship has helped to redress this limitation with essential altruistic resource donations from these external agencies to supplement traditional sources of support. Social media is the obvious medium for social enterprises to acquire knowledge and resources to support their social agendas. Following a sequential mixed methods design, a model is developed to appraise the impact of the various contributions from social media networks on social value creation. This model is predicated on the extant literature, mostly on for-profit organisations, contextualised and a questionnaire developed to represent social entrepreneurship from interviews with social enterprises in the UK. Data is collected from two hundred and thirty-one UK based social enterprises whose mission is to provide social value for their target populations. The model is validated for factors that lead from knowledge sharing due to social media networking to concomitant increases in social provision by fitting to these data. Findings demonstrate that social media use leads to increases in social value creation through knowledge sharing. The novel construct of enhanced organisational performance is shown as seminal in enabling shared knowledge gained from social media to be converted into increased social value.