Chapter 12, Investigating the Role of PLS- SEM and ANN in the Adoption of Social Media Marketing by SMEs

In light of the growing importance of social networking marketing (SMM) to the profitability of tiny and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) and the relatively modest adoption rate of SMM among SMEs, this study seeks to determine which factors influence SMEs’ adoption of SMM. This study, unlike the majority of others, proposed a two-stage analysis combining the partial least squares (PLS) method with an artificial intelligence technique called an artificial neural network (ANN). The suggested model has a 92% success rate in prediction using a deep ANN architecture. There was a strong correlation between the marketing rate for social media site adoption and the following factors: perceived efficiency, user acceptance of usage, perceived expenditures, encouragement from higher management, advantageous circumstances, and vendor pressure. By illuminating the function of technical, corporate, and ecological (TOE) factors in customers’ acceptance of social media promotional efforts, this research adds to the growing corpus of research on internet advertising.