Social Media Technologies' Use for Competitive Information and Informational Trust and their Effects on Innovation in Industrial SMES

Abstract

In developing economies, information and communication technologies (ICT) help to increase, among other things, economic prosperity, living standards, financial industry growth, and sustainable development. Thus, this paper focuses on the effects of the use of social media on SMEs' innovation performance. Importantly, it explores the moderating of informational trust as playing a contingent role on the relations between social media and SME's innovation performance. The proposed model has been verified using data from 371 SME owners or top managers. Our findings provide empirical evidence that the positive effects of social media use significantly influence SMEs' innovation performance, and that this relationship becomes stronger when informational trust is high rather than low.