The Benefits of Social Media Use Among Wine Resellers

Within the context of both academic and practitioner speculating on if, how, why businesses are adopting Web 2.0 applications to benefit their business operations, communications or marketing, this thesis uses the Dutch wine market to examines these questions. Dutch wine reselling businesses are often run and managed by the entrepreneur who began the business and employ few if any additional staff. With limited resources, they are challenged in marketing their products and themselves. These challenges align with the opportunities presented by Web 2.0 phenomena. This research examines to what extent these resellers are utilizing social networking sites to benefit their business. An exploratory, online survey was distributed nationally to owner/managers of on-trade businesses to gather demographic information about the owner/managers and their businesses as well as perceived benefits and frequency of using social networking sites for their businesses. The survey also explored barriers to social media use for business among non-users. Data collected from 99 respondents revealed that 76% of respondents are using social media to benefit their business to some extent. From this a profile of both user businesses and non-user businesses could be developed. Twitter was found to be the most popular network among business users across most activity types. Following that, perceptions of the benefits of using social media to conduct various business activities were calculated. Statistically significant relationships between age and perceived benefits as well as usage intensity and perceived benefits were found. Additionally, factors to non-use, or barriers to use, were ranked. It was found that time and not knowing where to begin are the two strongest barriers to using social media among non-user respondents. In summary, findings reveal that businesses are using social media to conduct various business-related activities and users cite various direct and indirect benefits to using the tools. Findings also suggest that non-users are open to using the tools they simply need guidance on where and how to begin.