تاثیر رسانه های اجتماعی بر ارزیابی کسب و کار Social Media Impact on Business Evaluation

1. Introduction In the globalized world the geographical and theoretical distance holds less of an importance for the politics, trade and other parts of life1 while the interests of the citizens and the entrepreneurs depend on and are linked with the global trends. Besides the the and communication the perspective of how businesses and states organize the production, trade and capital investments, creation of new services and products and the corresponding marketing activities2 . The new economy creates conditions for such companies which organizational logistic is organized based on a network structure incorporating the new Technologies, thus facilitating coordination, control and communication3 . This is further enhanced by the increase of the internet speed and the number of users possibly leading to the majority of world’s population participation in any sort of social networks by 20254 . The entrepreneurs are paying ever more attention to the role of the social networks in order to gain as much of the economic good as possible. The newest tendencies in the internet marketing and business communication indicate that the impact of the social media continues to grow. Some parts of community actively communicate with this tool, while the others are trying to adapt themselves, while all of them are interested to organize the communication of their company in the social media in the most effective way. If before the social media marketing could be considered a non-traditional method of marketing, nowadays it is a fully fledged tool. Besides in the settings of highly competitive environment the importance of the social media in the entrepreneurship increases5 . The statistics gathered by the bureau of statistics “Eurostat” in 2015 indicate that 75% of EU entrepreneurs are using the social media for marketing purposes of their produce while the same proportion of companies have a web-page. In Latvia only 58% of companies do (in Lithuania – 78%, Estonia – 80%), therefore it can be assumed that social media use literacy of the Latvian companies are rather low6 . Taking into consideration that in the second half of 2016 Latvia was considered to have the 6st fastest broad-band internet connection in the world and 4th in Europe7 and that the internet service in Latvia is one of the most accessible from the price perspective (most significantly for connections with speed of 4 to 8 Mbps – by 47% cheaper than the average in Europe) 8 overall 78% of citizens are using internet daily, and 79% of internet users are shopping online. These facts indicate that the citizens of Latvia are open for further use of social media marketing.