Mapping the relationship between social media usage and organizational performance: A meta-analysis

Business organizations are surging to integrate social media with their business and operations management, as it is broadly recognized that social media usage (SMU) could bring them superior performance advantages, especially in the digital era. However, prior studies investigating the effects of SMU on organizational performance provide scattered, mixed, and even conflicting results from diverse disciplines. This study aims to map the comprehensive relationship between SMU and organizational performance by adopting meta-analysis and examining potential factors that moderate such relationships. Based on the sample size of 24,576 organizations accumulated from 65 empirical studies, this study attempts to dissect SMU into manifold practices containing social marketing, social listening & monitoring, social communication, and social networking & collaboration. Meanwhile, these SMUs have varying relationships not only with financial performance but also with innovation, social and operational performance. Further analysis results also confirm that theoretical lens, social media platforms, and industry-level factors (i.e., firm size, industry type, economic market) significantly moderate the strength of SMU–Performance relationships. These findings provide theoretical contributions, managerial implications, and future research directions on the integrated SMU–Performance relationship.