Antecedents of Early Adoption and Use of Social Media Networks for Stakeholder Communications: Evidence from Franchising*^*

* We thank the French National Research Agency for its support (reference: ANR‐08‐BLAN‐0020‐01 and ANR FRANBLE), Kelly Prioux for her valuable assistance in the data collection, and Richard D. Waters for his relevant comments.

Abstract

The motivation for this paper arises from the importance of stakeholder communications for firms and the rapid emergence of social media networks as a means of such communications. Our purpose is to understand the early adoption and use of social media networks for such communications by firms at a point in time when such networks were relatively new. Specifically, we examine the adoption and use of Facebook (the most popular social networking site) by franchisors and focus on two questions: (1) antecedents of early adoption of Facebook by franchisors, mainly in terms of system age, size, organizational form, advertising royalty rates, industry, and internationalization; and (2) variations in use of Facebook (in terms of content) by these franchisors and the way these variations relate to the characteristics of the franchisors and their systems. Our empirical study covers 408 franchisors doing business in the French market. The analysis approach is quantitative, with the use of t‐tests, Pearson chi‐square tests, and a logistic regression model as well as a content analysis of the franchisors' Facebook pages. At the time we collected data, we found that only 21.3 percent of the franchisors had a presence on Facebook. Several characteristics of the system (e.g., percentage of company‐owned outlets, advertising royalty rates, and industry) influence whether a franchisor has a presence on Facebook as well as the nature of content on the relevant Facebook page. We draw on organizational theories and institutional economic theories to offer potential explanations for our preliminary investigation. These research findings can help the franchisors better understand the role of social media networks for stakeholder communications. In particular, our results offer insights for smaller franchisors, in terms of when and how they adopt communication innovations to compete against larger firms.

The Journal of Small Business Management Special Issue on Franchising in conjunction with the 25th Annual International Society of Franchising Conference

Please do not cite or distribute without permission

* We thank the French National Research Agency for its support (reference: ANR‐08‐BLAN‐0020‐01 and ANR FRANBLE), Kelly Prioux for her valuable assistance in the data collection, and Richard D. Waters for his relevant comments.

The Journal of Small Business Management Special Issue on Franchising in conjunction with the 25th Annual International Society of Franchising Conference

Please do not cite or distribute without permission

* We thank the French National Research Agency for its support (reference: ANR‐08‐BLAN‐0020‐01 and ANR FRANBLE), Kelly Prioux for her valuable assistance in the data collection, and Richard D. Waters for his relevant comments.

Notes

The Journal of Small Business Management Special Issue on Franchising in conjunction with the 25th Annual International Society of Franchising Conference

Please do not cite or distribute without permission

* We thank the French National Research Agency for its support (reference: ANR‐08‐BLAN‐0020‐01 and ANR FRANBLE), Kelly Prioux for her valuable assistance in the data collection, and Richard D. Waters for his relevant comments.

1 For expositional clarity, we consider innovators and early adopters together when referring to the early adoption of Facebook by franchisors.

2 Although franchisor resources can also be measured in terms of financial (e.g., profits, current assets) and human resource metrics (Perdreau, Le Nadant, and Cliquet 2011), data on these measures are not easily available for all franchisors. For example, some financial metrics are only available for large, publicly traded franchisors—this skews the sample by preventing the inclusion of smaller, privately held franchisors.

3 We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer and the AE for comments that have strengthened the discussion about H1 and H2.

4 Although it is possible for us to estimate the costs of setting up and professionally maintaining a Facebook page today, we do not know what these costs were for the time period for which data were collected and when there was greater uncertainty about the value of using Facebook for marketing communications. Hindsight biases and recall inaccuracies may limit the benefit of asking franchisors now about what these costs were for the period in question.

5 For the t‐tests, we first looked at the significance of the Levene's test to determine which type of t‐test to use. If the Levene test was significant, we conducted the t‐test with “equal variances not assumed.” If the Levene's test was not significant, we conducted the t‐test with “equal variances assumed.” For all the results in the t‐tests, we observed the two‐tailed significance levels.

6 We are grateful to the AE for this insight.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rozenn Perrigot

Rozenn Perrigot is Associate Professor of Marketing, Graduate School of Management—University of Rennes 1, and ESC Rennes School of Business, Rennes, France.

Manish Kacker

Manish Kacker is Associate Professor, Marketing and Michael Lee‐Chin & Family Professor in Strategic Business Studies at the DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada.

Guy Basset

Guy Basset is Associate Professor of Marketing in the Graduate School of Management—University of Rennes 1, Rennes, France.

Gérard Cliquet

Gérard Cliquet is Professor of Marketing in the Graduate School of Management—University of Rennes 1, Rennes, France.