Factors Affecting SMEs Owners to Use Social Media for Online Advertisement in Kuwait

This study examines the factors that affect small and medium enterprises in Kuwait to use social media for online advertisement of their products. The study adopted to use the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, (UTAUT), model to check the acceptance level of social media applications as a platform for online advertisement and correlation analysis to establish how each factor affects behavioural intention to use social media for online advertisement. The study adopts six factors, i.e., Performance expectancy, perceived price advantage, social influence, hedonic value, facilitating conditions, as independent variables and behavioural intention as dependent variable. This research used questionnaire for the purpose of collecting primary numeric data from participants. Each questionnaire contained items, including location and biological information of the respondent and experience in social media advertisement. The sample size used in this study was 206 participants. After collecting the data, the analysis was done using SPSS software to do a one sample t-test and correlation analysis. The findings indicated that the independent variables, performance expectancy, facilitating conditions, social influence and hedonic value, positively affect behavioural intention to use social media for online advertisement. Perceived price advantage has a negative effect.