Social Media and Entrepreneurship Challenges in the Sultanate of Oman

Nasser Al Harrasi, Ahmed Nawaz Hakro, Vijayakumar Srinavasan, Blossom Christina, Mariya Al Jabri

Abstract

The study explores the premise that social media overcomes the management, technology, and marketing challenges entrepreneurs face in using social media networking platforms. A field survey is designed to capture the entrepreneurial challenges faced by social media user entrepreneurs. The data captures the regional representation, gender, number of products, sales, age, qualifications, and major challenges of technology, marketing, and management issues. The results confirm that social media helps entrepreneurs overcome several challenges. The gender factor indicates a significant positive relationship with work and family life and managerial skills. The marketing challenge has a significant positive relationship with self-confidence, networks, industry contacts, and information asymmetry. This study identifies the entrepreneurship challenges faced by the users and how social media contributes to overcoming these challenges. The study is novel due to identifying the entrepreneurs’ skills of using social media and overcoming many challenges such as management skills to run the business, accessing the modern technology, pricing the goods/services, identifying unfavorable market conditions, reducing the cost of machinery maintenance, the effect of competition, self-confidence, demand fluctuation, finding more suppliers, networks, industry contacts, and accessing market-related information. The challenges are investigated with many factors such as gender, number of the products or services, turnover (sales), age, daily usage, number of likes or followers, and age of sales/income from social media.

 

Keywords: challenges, social media, entrepreneurship, Sultanate of Oman.


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