Social media marketing as an entrepreneurial learning process

The purpose for this paper is to explore social media marketing from the perspective of entrepreneurial learning. The theoretical basis consists of contributions from the fields of organisational learning and entrepreneurship. An empirical study involving ten companies has been carried out. The data were analysed with methods inspired by grounded theory. Categories describing the companies’ social media presence from an entrepreneurial learning perspective are provided. The value of using organisational learning as a framework for social media marketing is shown. Thus, the paper presents a novel way of studying social media activities which should contribute to the theoretical fields of organisational learning and entrepreneurship as well as to the understanding of social media marketing. For practitioners, the findings provide additional knowledge that should be useful for their own social media activities.