Social Media Customer Relationship Management and Business Performance: Empirical Evidence from an Emerging Market

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how social media marketing engagement efforts mediate the relationships between CRM and the business performance. We argue that social media marketing engagement efforts used by the companies will enhance the positive influence of CRM on business performance. We used Hunt and Morgan’s (1995) resource–advantage theory (R-A theory) as the theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between CRM and business performance mediated by online social media marketing efforts. Data for the study is collected using face-to-face personal surveys conducted with n=152 top management team members of randomly selected companies across a broad spectrum of industries located in Turkey. The study findings indicate that traditional CRM approach had positive effect on firm performance, but the relationship was partially mediated by the social media marketing engagement (SCRM) activities. The strength of the relationship along with the explained variance improved when SCRM was introduced into the structural model. This study provides additional empirical support for the role of the SCRM in modern organizations. It fills the gap in the literature in shedding light to the value of SCRM in the context of an emerging market environment to realize the full benefits of CRM.