Performance of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises: Insights from Social Media Usage in Juba City, South Sudan

Small and Medium Enterprises are the main forces behind economic growth, social progress, and job creation in South Sudan. Business and customers benefit from using social platform on increasing their daily business operations. However, enterprises in South Sudan are performing poorly since there was a reduction in businesses output from 58% in 2017 to 30% in 2021. Thus, the study looked into how social media usage affected the performance of small and medium-sized businesses in Juba City, South Sudan. The specific objectives were to assess how small and medium-sized firms' performance was affected by their use of social media for marketing, customer relations, social media interactions, and information search. The study also examined the moderating effect of government regulations on the relationship between social media usage and the performance of small and medium-sized enterprises. The study was anchored on Resource- Based View, media richness theory and regulatory capture theory. The study employed an explanatory research design and target population was 252 small and medium-sized enterprises in Juba City; 154 firms were selected using simple random sampling. Structured questionnaire was employed to collect data. Data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The study found that the performance was positively and significantly affected by the use of social media for information search, social media interactions, social media usage and customer relations, and social media marketing. The study also established that social media usage and firm performance were affected by government regulations. The study concluded that social media usage contributes significantly to enhanced performance of small and medium enterprises. The researcher recommends that small and medium enterprises management should ensure they integrate the social media applications in their management systems. The researcher also recommends that in order to improve their performance on social media, small and medium enterprises identify their areas of strength and weakness. The management should employ modem technology in order to gain from data transfer, emailing, and texting while implementing a social media workforce. The government of South Sudan should ensure that suitable information technology training is offered to small and medium enterprises’ owners for the adoption of social media and other technological innovations.