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Social media for entrepreneurship: Social media for

entrepreneurship
myth or reality? A structured
literature review and a future
research agenda 149
Giustina Secundo, Pasquale Del Vecchio and Gioconda Mele Received 8 July 2020
Revised 1 September 2020
Department of Innovation Engineering, University of Salento, Lecce, Italy Accepted 18 September 2020

Abstract
Purpose – This paper provides a structured literature review (SLR) about the effects of social media
technologies on entrepreneurship activities and processes, to identify relationships, connectivity and
interdependencies. The paper offers an outline of the past and the present literature and frames a future
research agenda.
Design/methodology/approach – The structured literature review has been conducted on 159 journal
papers extracted from Scopus, initially submitted to a bibliometric analysis. A final list of 69 papers published
in a variety of academic journals specialized in the field of entrepreneurship, information science and business
management has been analyzed through a content and bibliometric analysis.
Findings – Findings show that literature is really scant, and four research streams have been identified: Social
media for entrepreneurial learning and self-employment; social media as tools for entrepreneurial marketing;
social media as sources of entrepreneurial opportunities and finally, social media as enablers of networking and
entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Research limitations/implications – The limitations of the study regard the need for more holistic studies,
considering both the technological and the social aspects.
Practical implications – The findings demonstrate the actuality of the research focus and the need of a deep
exploration about the role of social media for the different forms of entrepreneurship process. This evidence
calls for a holistic and integrated framework.
Originality/value – The originality of the paper resides in a novel SLR with reference to the recent role of
social media for entrepreneurship. Despite the increasing literature, the debate in such field is still fragmented
and under-researched, offering a promising research field.
Keywords Entrepreneurship, Social media, Entrepreneurial marketing, Structured literature review
Paper type Literature review

Introduction and Background

Digitalization is opening up fascinating innovation opportunities for innovators, creators
and entrepreneurs (Carayannis and Formica, 2006; Cohen et al., 2017; Nambisan, 2017;
Patroni et al., 2020; Ramaswamy and Ozcan, 2018; Testa et al., 2020; Yoo et al., 2010). Today,
due to the availability of much more data and computer power, this frontier is shaped
strongly by the state of digital technologies and more specifically by the wide adoption of
social media that allow people, employees and entrepreneurs to communicate among them,
to communicate with customers, to identifies new suppliers and partners and to cocreate
novel opportunities with them (e.g. social networking sites, blog platforms, wikis, Facebook
and social tagging tools) (Shams and Kaufmann, 2016; Oppong et al., 2020). Social media
tools such as Facebook, Youtube and Twitter cover a prominent role within the society
and in different fields, such as tourism (Del Vecchio et al., 2018; Shams and Lombardi, International Journal of
2016), accounting (Lombardi and Secundo, 2020) and academic entrepreneurship Entrepreneurial Behavior &
Research
Vol. 27 No. 1, 2021
pp. 149-177
The authors would like to thank you the editor Prof Paul Jones and the anonymous reviewers for their © Emerald Publishing Limited
1355-2554
helpful support and comments. DOI 10.1108/IJEBR-07-2020-0453
IJEBR (Secundo et al., 2020). Digital technologies represent a subset of digital ecosystems in which
27,1 “computer-Mediated tools that make it possible for anyone to create, circulate, share, and
exchange information in a variety of formats and with multiple communities” (Leonardi
and Vaast, 2017, p. 150). Moreover, social media as defined by Kaplan and Haenlein (2012,
p. 61) are “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and
technological foundations of Web 2.0 and allow the creation and exchange of user-
generated content”. Social media platforms can be classified into knowledge/professional
150 oriented (LinkedIn, Twitter) and social/personal oriented (Facebook/Instagram) (Stieglitz
and Dang-Xuan, 2013).
Social media technologies are modifying the way business people and entrepreneurs
interact among them, identify the entrepreneurial opportunities, engage several
stakeholders and connect to the external ecosystem (Kaufmann and Shams, 2015; Shams
and Kaufmann, 2016; Gupta and Bose, 2019). Social media’s openness and connectivity
overcomes the inability or difficulty entrepreneurs experience in identifying and reaching
out for expert advice (Kuhn et al., 2016; Nylander and Rudstr€om, 2011), by leveraging on
customers’ engagement. Considering the profound impact, social media have had and are
expected to have, it is not surprising the fact that they could have a relevant impact also for
entrepreneurship process and performance (Ahmad et al., 2019; Beliaeva et al., 2019). In their
seminal article, Shane and Venkataraman (2000) defined entrepreneurship as the
identification, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities. Since this definition has been
diffused among scholars involved within the field entrepreneurship and innovation, several
changes have afflicted the competitive context which is becoming increasingly complex and
turbulent. Later, Shane (2012) underlined that entrepreneurship is a process, not a one-time
event, that requires the engagement of the entrepreneurs in several other activities after
having identified the idea. Defined in a Schumpeterian perspective, as the ability to respond to
the creative processes of change, entrepreneurship has been characterized, in several studies,
as a virtuous combination of intellectual capital and market’s opportunities, as the capacity of
managing under uncertainty, to assume the risk of a new venture, to be able to identify and
exploit previous unexplored opportunities (Byers et al., 2011; Romano et al., 2014;
Venkataraman, 2004). Companies have to be entrepreneurial the whole time, independent of
their age and developmental stage. At individual and corporate level, entrepreneurship can be
framed as a never-ending process which involves all employee since company’s
competitiveness is increasingly related to the organizational capacity to engage all
employees to see themselves as innovative entrepreneurs involved into entrepreneurial
learning processes aiming to purse new growth opportunities for the business (Ghoshal and
Bartlett, 1999; Rae, 2012; Schjoedt and Shaver, 2019).
Social media technologies engage more stakeholders in the identification of the
entrepreneurial opportunities and more in general to develop the entrepreneurial process
at individual, organizational and regional level. The impact of social media technologies could
be intense on different activities, described as corporate entrepreneurship (Christensen, 2004;
Corbett et al., 2013), independent entrepreneurship, for start-up companies (Blank, 2010) and
for entrepreneurial ecosystems (Isenberg, 2011; Somsuk and Laosirihongthong 2014),
entrepreneurial education of highly skilled individuals and finally, also for academic
entrepreneurship (Rippa and Secundo, 2019; Rothaermel et al., 2007). It is valuable to make the
assumption according to which implications of the social media revolution for
entrepreneurship are likely to be addressed with reference to a variety of issues. So far,
how social media technologies are affecting the way individuals identify new opportunities
for digital business, organize their entrepreneurial team and eventually propose the launch of
firms’ creation, remains an issue yet to be addressed. This new wave of social media adoption
in business management field will introduce substantial challenges on how to handle
entrepreneurship process in terms of support for the continuous entrepreneurial learning
process, opportunities identification and stakeholders’ engagement. A holistic perspective Social media for
about the emerging research stream of social media for entrepreneurship is indeed required to entrepreneurship
posit new directions for research about the impact of social media technologies on the
entrepreneurial process.
Even if structured literature reviews (SLRs) about the strategic role of social media for
several contexts already exist with specific focuses, such as social media in marketing
(Alalwan et al., 2017; Alves et al., 2016), social media for tourism and hospitality (Leung et al.,
2013), social media in higher education (Tess, 2013), social media in chronic disease 151
management (Merolli et al., 2013), to our best knowledge no SLR exists with reference to the
recent role of social media for Entrepreneurship more in general. According to Massaro et al.
(2016) a SLR “is not the end of the road, but the beginning of new journeys”. The main goal of
this paper is therefore to investigate the effects of social media technologies on
entrepreneurship activities and processes, bridging and combining two consolidated
streams of literature, social media tools and entrepreneurship to investigate how these
pervasive technologies could support the different phases of entrepreneurship. The final
purpose is to identify the relationships, connectivity and interdependencies between social
media and entrepreneurship. This motivates the need for our study.
A SLR was conducted utilizing the methodology of Tranfield et al. (2003) combined
with the application of a quality threshold for journal selection, in which 159 journal
papers were initially extracted from Scopus. A final list of 69 papers published in a
variety of academic journals has been analyzed through a content and bibliometric
analysis. Interestingly, findings show the focus of the extant literature primarily on four
main areas of interest, related to the role of social media as: (1) technologies for
entrepreneurial learning and self-employment; (2) tools for entrepreneurial marketing; (3)
sources of entrepreneurial opportunities and (4) enablers of networking and entrepreneurial
ecosystems. These results highlight the comprehension of the phenomenon observed and
are of useful baseline for academic and practitioners implications about the evolution of
the social media for entrepreneurship. The originality of the work resides both in the study
of the recent role of social media for entrepreneurship processes and activities and in the
attempt to overcome the fragmentation of the literature in this field by inspiring a more in
depth investigation. Additionally, the paper is aimed to identify lessons learnt and
research gaps, and by this to provide a contribution at the development of a future
research agenda.
The remaining of the paper is structured as follows: after the introduction, in Section 2
the methodology is illustrated. Section 3 presents the findings in terms of descriptive
statistics and content analysis. Moreover, the research streams emerging from the cluster
analysis are described and discussed. In the final Sections, conclusions and implications
are detailed.

Methodology
This study adopts a SLR methodology to investigate and analyze the research area on
“entrepreneurship” and “social media”, identifying the trends and growth of knowledge and
future potentialities in this promising research area (Centobelli et al., 2017; Massaro et al.,
2016; Petticrewand Roberts, 2006; Tranfield et al., 2003). The review of literature aims to
measure the impact of publications, to identify the most influential authors and the journals
that publish more articles, the most important keyword related. According to Pittaway and
Cope (2007), the SLRs represents an appropriate method for examining research on
entrepreneurship and more recently, thanks to the availability of numerous academic papers,
it has reached a significant progress that go beyond simply summarizing and deducting
researches. Moreover, the principles of SLRs provide adequate transparency and replicability
IJEBR as a research method (Armitage and Keeble-Allen, 2008; Tranfield et al., 2003). Literature
27,1 suggests different approaches for identifying the article to review and the phases to follow
that can be summarized as follows (Christoffersen, 2013; Dumay and Cai 2014; Massaro et al.,
2015a, b; Thorpe et al., 2005):
(1) Definition of the research questions;
(2) Write a research protocol;
152
(3) Determine the papers to analyze;
(4) Develop a coding framework;
(5) Perform a critical analysis and discussion, identifying future research and path.
Thus, the first phase in performing a SLR refers to the definition of three main research
questions (Massaro et al., 2016), that in our study can be expressed as follows:
RQ1. How is the entrepreneurship literature developing according to the prominent
adoption of social media?
RQ2. What is the focus of the literature within social media for entrepreneurship?
RQ3. What are the implications for the research in the field of social media for
entrepreneurship?
The first research question aims to define a “state of the art” in the literature about the
emerging phenomenon of social media, and its impact on the research topics related to
entrepreneurship. The second research question is more focused on the research stream of
social media for entrepreneurship in order to underline how so far the role of social media has
been studied with reference to the process of entrepreneurship. Finally, the third research
question helps the researchers to discuss and provide insights and implication in the fields of
social media for entrepreneurship.
The second phase of SLR regards the research protocol that requires the identification of
information sources, the methods, the mean and tools used for analyzes and synthesizes of
the studies (Petticrew and Roberts, 2006).
Afterward the third phase is to select the paper to include in the literature review: two search
strings are defined in order to launch the query in the scientific database, “entrepreneurship”
and “social media”. The scientific database used to extract articles was Scopus, a database that
provides an extensive coverage of articles and more than 20,000 peer-reviewed journals (Mishra
et al., 2017). Scopus have a larger number of papers than Web of science (WoS) (Thelwall, 2018),
and most of the papers indexed in WoS are included in Scopus as well (97%) (Waltman, 2016).
The fourth phase of coding framework has the objective to define the items to be analyzed
in the selected articles. For this study, we identified the following items for coding:
(1) Timing of publication: the evolution over the time of the number (Nr) of papers;
(2) Geographic distribution of papers: papers distribution among countries;
(3) Journals: distribution of papers among journals and citations received;
(4) Author and citations analysis: number of citations of articles, citations per year,
citations per year (CPY) ranking;
(5) Relevant keywords and topics: the most frequent of authors’ keywords used.
The final phase of SLR aims to perform a critical analysis and discussion of the selected
paper, identifying future research and path. The critical analysis is combined with a
bibliometric analysis in order to decrease errors and to enhance the value of the research Social media for
outcomes (Fahimnia et al., 2015; Feng et al., 2017). entrepreneurship
The selection of the paper was performed by extracting from Scopus database, the
documents that have both the search keywords stream: “entrepreneurship” and “social
media” in the title, abstract, author keywords and published only in journal, with exclusion of
conference papers, book chapters, research notes, editorials and commentaries (Keupp et al.,
2012). This is required to take in consideration only papers with empirically validated
knowledge (Podsakoff et al., 2005). This searching criteria result to be reproducible, 153
comprehensive and unbiased. The first result was a total of 159 paper published in the period
from January 2009 to August 2020, where 2009 is the year seeing the first paper. To define a
more convenient set of papers, some inclusion and exclusion criteria has been set, and three
researchers have been involved in the identification of the relevant articles for the subsequent
descriptive and cluster analysis, by reading autonomously the abstracts and titles.
The complete process of papers’ selection is represented in Figure 1:
(1) A total of 159 papers downloaded from Scopus database, after setting search stream;
(2) A total of 90 papers articles were excluded by researching after reading titles
and abstracts due to the fact that they covered or just the social media role or

Figure 1.
Research design and
phases
IJEBR the wide spectrum of entrepreneurship research without addressing at the same
27,1 time the role of social media for entrepreneurship. The articles considering
“entrepreneurship” with “social media”, after exclusion criteria 49 are useful for
further analyses.
(3) A csv format file was extracted with the following items: title, abstract, author(s),
authors’ keyword, number of citations, year, affiliation, sources and references.
154 Two kind of analysis were performed on the selected papers (69): a descriptive analysis and a
cluster analysis. Descriptive analysis aims to highlight some features of the publications,
such as the evolution on time of published papers, the distribution by country, with the
objective to highlight literature contribution in the specific topics within specific nation
(Massaro and Dumay, 2015a). Following the suggestions of Dumay (2014), it has also been
evaluated the impact of each paper, by comparing the number of citation and the CPY; finally,
citations and collaborations among authors are identified.
In order to extract the most frequent keywords, an occurrence analysis was performed.
After coding of articles, also manually by authors, in order to solve discrepancies and to
increase the validity of the results, data were analyzed with the tool VOSviewer, a tool for
constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks and clusters (Van Eck and Waltman,
2014). By using VOSviewer two different techniques have been adopted, such as
co-occurrence (Van Eck and Waltman, 2014) and bibliographic analysis. Co-occurrence
analysis (Van Eck and Waltman, 2014) allows to evaluate the relatedness of the articles on the
basis of common authors’ keywords. In VOSviewer, we set the unit of analysis as the
“author’s keywords” and as threshold in order to include paper with minimum two
occurrence of a keyword.
The bibliographic coupling techniques (Kessler, 1963) evaluate the relation of the articles
on the basis of the number of references that they share (Boyack and Klavans, 2010). In
adopting VOSviewer, units of analysis “documents” and as threshold papers with minimum
five citations of documents have been implemented.
For all analysis performed with VOSviewer, a fractional counting is used (Leydesdorff and
Opthof, 2010). Finally, a content analysis has been performed on each paper of the cluster
defined with VOSviewer in order to identify emerging research areas, research gaps and
issues for future directions. The main evidences coming from SRL are presented in the next
section.

Research findings: insights and critique

This section presents the main evidences resulting from the systematic literature review with
the aim to address the following research questions:
RQ1. How is the entrepreneurship literature developing according to the prominent
adoption of social media?
RQ2. What is the focus of the literature within social media for entrepreneurship?
RQ3. What are the implications for the research in the field of social media for
entrepreneurship?
The remaining section is structured in two parts: a bibliometric analysis of the selected paper
and a content analysis, regarding a more in depth analysis of the selected papers.

Descriptive analysis
Articles evolution in time. Figure 2 represents the evolution of the article published from 2009
to 2020. As shown by the figure, the trend of the number of published articles as being
 25
Social media for
20 entrepreneurship
20
NUMBER OF PAPERS

15 13 13
11

10 155
5
5
2
1 1 1 1 1 Figure 2.
0 Trend of the published
0 articles over the time
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 frame 2009–2020
YEAR OF PUBBLICATION

growing after 2014, the first articles date back 2009 (1) and the same number is registered in
three years later. From 2014, the trend is rising till to 20 papers published in 2019. In 2020, the
trend seems to be promising considering that 13 papers have been already published. This
demonstrates the actuality of the research focus and the need of a deep exploration in future
studies about the role of social media for the different forms of entrepreneurship process.
Subject areas of the article. In this section, the distribution of the articles according to
subject areas is analyzed. As it can be observed from Table 1, business, management and
accounting, social sciences, economics, econometrics and finance are the leading area along
with computer science and engineering. This evidence confirms the trend according to which
the need to analyze the strategic, organisational and economic impact of social media tools on
some processes; aspects and activities of the entrepreneurial process comes mainly from the
social science, where these tools are widely used for social purposes, and then moves to the
business and engineering field where they can be used for sustaining, enhancing and
speeding up the process of opportunity identification, to finish to their adoption for better
connecting the enterprises with the suppliers and customers.
Geography of the articles. To analyze the geography of the article published in the
monitored time, it has been take in consideration the distribution of the published article by
country and the relative citation by country (Figure 3). The total number of papers and
citations was calculated considering the involvement in the authorship of a country, a
university or a research center, in the case of authors of different countries, each of them had a
point. This kind of analysis allows us to understand which of the countries have a major
contribution in the research topics focused in this study: entrepreneurship and social media
stream. The total countries that contributed to the research about social media for
entrepreneurship are 31; this evidence explains the fragmentation of the studies, also among
countries, that range from the United States and the United Kingdom till Finland, Canada,
Taiwan and Zambia.

Subject area Number of papers

Business, management and accounting 83

Social sciences 80
Economics, econometrics and finance 33
Computer science 26 Table 1.
Engineering 22 Classification of the
Arts and humanities 16 articles by
Others 55 subject areas
IJEBR 180

27,1 160

140

120

100

80
156 60

40

20

Zambia
Taiwan
United States

India
United Kingdom

Malaysia
Indonesia

Spain

South Korea

Australia

Switzerland
Egypt
Italy

Brazil
Ireland

France

Norway
Saudi Arabia
Canada
Iran

Turkey
Bagladesh
New Zealand
South Africa

Finland

Estonia
Pakistan
Russian Federation
Nigeria
United Arab Emirates

Sweden
Figure 3.
Geography of the
articles by number of
paper/citations per
country
NUMBER OF ARTICLES NUMBER OF CITATIONS

Specifically, the evidences demonstrated that:

(1) The top-seven countries, in terms of number of publications, were: the United States,
the United Kingdom, Spain, Malaysia, Ireland, Indonesia and India (Figure 4);
(2) The top three countries, in terms of number of publication are: the United States with
16 papers, the United Kingdom with 10 papers and India with seven. There are two
countries with six papers, Indonesia and Malaysia, followed by Spain with three
papers.
(3) The top three countries in term of citations are: the United States (160), the United
Kingdom (126) and the United Arab Emirates (36); these data has also confirmed the
ranking of the top three most cited paper (Table 3).
Journals distribution. The number of publications in specific topics represents an
important indicator for researchers and authors (Dumay and Cai, 2014). The numbers of
selected papers for the purpose of our study (69 papers) is an important indicator of the
potentiality of exploration of the research topics.
The analysis of the main sources evidences the fragmentation of publications in different
journals: indeed 55 journals publish a number of papers ranging from one to four. The Journal
of Small Business and Enterprise Development is the only one journal with four papers
published. Other venues have from three to two papers published (See Table 2). Figure 5
represents the network of co-cited sources created by Vosviewer with a minimum criterion of
15 citations for sources, published in most recent years. The journals Entrepreneurship
theory and practice, Journal of Small business management and Journal of Business
Venturing are the three journals that published the most articles on research on this topic,
confirming them as the most cited journals so far (Figure 5).
Citations and most influential authors. Figure 6 shows the evolution of citations by years,
in the period 2009–2020. The trend reveals a scarce consideration for the articles developed
between 2014 and 2015 (in 2013 there are no paper published). The number of citations
increased between 2017 and 2018; in 2019, there is a new decrease of citations, and this trend
seems to be confirmed also in 2020 (Table 4) (see Figure 7).
 Social media for
entrepreneurship

157

Figure 4.
Top seven countries
(VOSviewer
elaboration)

Journal title Number of paper

Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development 4

Journal of Research in Marketing and Entrepreneurship 3
Journal of Business Venturing Insights 3
Advanced Science Letters 3
Sustainability (Switzerland) 2
Journal of Business Research 2 Table 2.
International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior and Research 2 Top journal with N8 of
International Journal of Emerging Markets 2 papers published

Author Cited
(-s) Title by Source Country (-ies)

Ahmad Reflections of entrepreneurs of small 31 Telematics and Informatics Saudi Arabia,

et al. and medium-sized enterprises United Arab
(2018) concerning the adoption of social Emirates
media and its impact on performance
outcomes: evidence from the UAE
Nakara Entrepreneurship and social media 31 International Journal of France
et al. marketing: evidence from French Entrepreneurship and
(2012) small business Small Business
Estrin The evolution and adoption of equity 29 Small Business Economics UK, Australia, Table 3.
et al. crowd funding: entrepreneur and USA Highlights of top three
(2018) investor entry into a new market cited papers
IJEBR
27,1

158

Figure 5.
Network of co-cited
sources

140
126
118
120

100

80 75

60

Figure 6. 40 31
Number of citations 25 27 26
received by articles 20 12
over the time frame 0 2 2 4
2009–2020 0
2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020

Citations received by the papers published each year

Category 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017

Citations 12 25 27 31 0 2 2 26 126
Number of papers 1 1 1 1 0 1 2 5 13

Citations received by the papers published each

year
Category 2018 2019 2020 Total
Table 4.
Citations trend. Time Citations 118 75 4 448
frame 2009–2020 Number of papers 11 20 13 69

The analysis of the most cited papers, listed in Table 3, demonstrates that the top three papers
have a number of citations from 29 to 31. It is interesting to note, as two of them have been
published in 2018 by demonstrating largely appreciated contributions by the community of
scholars and researchers in the field.
With the aim to have a clearer and larger overview of the citation trends, in Table 5 top ten
articles, the date of publication, the citation, the CPY and the CPY ranking are presented.
 140
Social media for
120 entrepreneurship
100

80

60
159
40

20
Figure 7.
0
Number of articles
2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 compared to the cited
articles
N. of papers N. citations

The trend of publications is also represented by Table 4 and the Figure 7 in which the lines
evidences the differences between the number of developed articles and related number of the
cited ones from 2009 to 2020. With the exception of the years 2014 and 2015, in which one
(2014) and two (2015) papers received only two citations, in the other years, citations exceed
the number of papers with the peak in 2017, where 13 paper received 126 citations. As already
underlined in 2013, no paper has been published. From 2009 to 2012, the only paper published
received citations between 11 and 22. By contrast, in 2019, the number of citations presents a
reduced trend of growth if considered the number of papers published in the same year, by
highlighting that some articles have been not considered influential in research or they will be
cited in the next years. Despite the limited portion of 2020 available, also in 2020, it seems that
there is limited interest for the paper published.
Table 5 illustrates the top ten articles published in the period analyzed along with the
relative CPY (Citation per Year) and the CPY ranking of the articles. The need to calculate the
CPY, according to Massaro et al. (2015a) is due to the less time to receive citations (Dumay,
2014). Evidences demonstrate that most cited article that is Ahmad et al. (2018) (Table 3) is not
the first in the ranking of CPY, but it is the second influential paper. In contrast, the paper
Rippa and Secundo (2019), despite it is published in 2019, is the most influential paper and is
ranked in the first position in the CPY ranking. These data remarks the importance of the
most recently paper published in 2018 and 2019.
Topics and common keywords
In order to extract the most common keyword and topics of the paper selected, an analysis
of keyword occurrences was performed with VOSviewer. Specifically, the analysis was
focused on the keyword used by authors, editors and publisher to link the articles published.
The analysis of authors’ keyword allows us to analyze “very large amounts of text without
losing touch with focusing on small amounts of the material in considerable depth”
(Silverman, 2013, p. 275). Keyword was extracted from the articles selected in our analysis
and subdivided in different clusters (Ribiere and Walter, 2013), according to their co-
occurrence in the same work. The results of this kind of analysis showed seven clusters,
setting the software with a threshold (fulfilled) that group together keywords that must
occurs at least two times and selecting only relevant keyword, removing terms such as
adoption, case studies, the United Arab Emirates, emirates. The results of clusters and
keyword are represented in the following Table 6 and Figure 8.
The most recurrent keyword is “SocialMedia” (62) and “entrepreneurship” (27) that
corresponds to the keywords defined in the queries on Scopus. These two keywords, as
IJEBR Cited Ranking
27,1 Authors Title Year Source title by CPY CPY

Ahmad et al. Reflections of 2018 Telematics and 31 10.34 2

entrepreneurs of small Informatics
and medium-sized
enterprises concerning
160 the adoption of social
media and its impact on
performance outcomes:
evidence from the UAE
Nakara et al. Entrepreneurship and 2012 International Journal of 31 3.44 8
social media marketing: Entrepreneurship and
evidence from French Small Business
small business
Estrin et al. The evolution and 2018 Learning Organization 29 9.66 3
adoption of equity crowd
funding: entrepreneur
and investor entry into a
new market
Duffy and Gender and self- 2017 Information 27 6.75 4
Pruchniewska enterprise in the social Communication and
media age: a digital Society
double bind
Rippa and Digital academic 2019 Technological 27 13.5 1
Secundo entrepreneurship: The Forecasting and Social
potential of digital Change
technologies on
academic
entrepreneurship
Carey and Emergent issues in 2011 Industry and Higher 27 2.70 9
Matlay enterprise education: the Education
educator’s perspective
Jones Entrepreneurial 2010 Journal of Research in 25 2.27 11
marketing and the Web Marketing and
2.0 interface Entrepreneurship
Mack et al. Entrepreneurs’ use of 2017 Telecommunications 20 5.00 6
Internet and social media Policy
applications
Park et al. Does social media use 2017 Sustainability 18 4.50 7
influence entrepreneurial (Switzerland)
opportunity? A review of
its moderating role
Nambisan and The role of demand-side 2016 Journal of Business 16 2.66 10
Zahra narratives in Venturing Insights
opportunity formation
and enactment
Table 5. Drummond The impact of social 2018 Industrial Marketing 16 5.33 5
Top eleven article per et al. media on resource Management
citation and citation mobilisation in
per year (CPY) entrepreneurial firms

shown in Figure 8, are in different clusters, 2 and 5. In particular, “SocialMedia” links

“entrepreneurship”, green cluster, with others clusters. The cluster “entrepreneurship” is
linked to different concepts related to social capital, social network. Interesting keywords are
“e-commerce” and “technology”, in sky blue cluster and “data mining” and “Social capital”, in
green cluster that are not linked to “student entrepreneur” or “business platform”.
 Keywords Occurrences
Social media for
entrepreneurship
Cluster 1 (3 items–red) Academic entrepreneurship 2
Digital technologies 2
Entrepreneurship education 2
Cluster 2 (3 items – green) Data mining 2
Entrepreneurship 27
Social capital 2 161
Cluster 3 (3 items – light blue) Education 3
Employment 2
Entrepreneurialism 3
Cluster 4 (3 items – light green) Entrepreneurial orientation 2
Institutions 2
Internet 2
Cluster 5 (3 items – violet) Business platform 3
Social media 62
Student entrepreneurs 3
Cluster 6 (2 items – sky blue) E-commerce 2
Technology 2 Table 6.
Cluster 7 (2 items – orange) Small and medium-size enterprises 2 Groups of authors’
SocialMedia network 2 keywords occurrence

Figure 8.
Authors keywords’
cluster

Clustering and content analysis

Clustering analysis. Clustering analysis was performed though a bibliographic coupling
(Kessler, 1963), according to the numbers of references shared in the selected 69 papers. The
articles that mainly share the same references (Boyack and Klavans, 2010) are considered to
evaluate the relatedness. As already descripted in the methodology section, the bibliographic
coupling method is performed with VOSviewer, selecting as unit of analysis the documents
and sources and set to consider minimum five citations of documents. This kind of analysis
produced six clusters with 23 papers (as only papers with five citations at least are
considered). (Figure 9).
In the Figure 9 are represented the clusters coming from the bibliographic coupling with
VOSviewer, considering the strength of the closeness in relation to the number of common
bibliography appearing in the article. The cluster technique of VOSviewer software works
out after running 10 interactions.
IJEBR Content analysis. In order to realize a more complete understanding of the main emerging
27,1 research areas, a deep content analysis of the 23 papers has been performed. Three
researchers proceeded independently with a detailed content analysis by reading all papers
with the aim to classify them according to the research area. This process allowed the
identification of four research areas that synthetizes the body of knowledge and consists on:
(1) Research area 1: Social media as technologies for entrepreneurial learning and self-
162 employment
(2) Research area 2: Social media as tools for entrepreneurial marketing
(3) Research area 3: Social media as sources of entrepreneurial opportunities
(4) Research area 4: Social media as enablers of networking and entrepreneurial
ecosystems
It is worth to note, as although most of the papers belonging to a specific bibliographic cluster
respond to the same research area, there is not in general a perfect matching. However, there
are some exceptions. Therefore, for a better representation of the research areas, the 23 papers
are recategorized into four research areas according to their content and focus, and not only
by considering the bibliographic coupling (Table 7).
The analysis of thematic areas of specialization of the paper included in the sample allows
us to identify four main areas of interest, related to the role of social media as: (1) technologies
for entrepreneurial learning and self-employment; (2) tools for entrepreneurial marketing; (3)
sources of entrepreneurial opportunities and (4) enablers of networking and entrepreneurial
ecosystems.
Research area 1: Social media as technologies for entrepreneurial learning and self-
employment. The first area presents the higher number of papers, with a temporal coverage
from the beginning of 2009 to 2019. Social media in this area are associated to the issue of
competence development with two different perspectives related to the entrepreneurial
learning and the opportunity of emancipation and self-employment. As for the first, social
media are identified as favorable venue for identifying competencies needs in the field of
entrepreneurship as well as for developing personalized learning paths (Jones and Iredale,
2009). In the same direction, the paper of Nawi et al (2017) focus on social media as business
platform supporting the creation of entrepreneurial competencies among young students.
The opportunity of self-and full-time employment in the context of fashion bloggers (Brydges
and Sj€oholm, 2019), the solving of a gender gap with the larger and positive involvement of
women in self-entrepreneurship initiatives (Duffy and Pruchniewska, 2017) and the
contribution at the development of innovative ventures in a traditional sector, such as
agriculture (Morris and James, 2017), are other relevant perspectives about the usage of social

Figure 9.
Clusters grouping
items with intersected
literature
Research areas Authors Year Citations Title
Social media for
entrepreneurship
Social media as technologies Jones and 2009 12 Entrepreneurship education and
for entrepreneurial learning Iredale Web 2.0
and self-employment (6 Hui et al. 2018 5 Making a living my way: necessity-
papers) driven entrepreneurship in resource-
constrained communities
Wu and Song 2019 13 Gratifications for social media use in 163
entrepreneurship courses: learners’
perspective
Nawi et al. 2017 7 Acceptance and usage of social
media as a platform among student
entrepreneurs
Brydges and 2019 9 Becoming a personal style blogger:
Sj€oholm changing configurations and
spatialities of aesthetic labor in the
fashion industry
Morris and 2017 11 Social media, an entrepreneurial
James opportunity for agriculture-based
enterprises
Social media as tools for Nakara et al. 2012 31 Entrepreneurship and social media
entrepreneurial marketing marketing: evidence from French
(6 papers) small business
Nambisan and 2016 16 The role of demand-side narratives
Zahra in opportunity formation and
enactment
Shemi and 2018 8 E-commerce and entrepreneurship
Procter in SMEs: case of myBot
Jose 2018 5 Strategic use of digital promotion
strategies among female emigrant
entrepreneurs in UAE
Duffy and 2017 27 Gender and self-enterprise in the
Pruchniewska social media age: a digital double
bind
Jones 2010 25 Entrepreneurial marketing and the
Web 2.0 interface
Social media as sources of Park et al. 2017 18 Does social media use influence
entrepreneurial opportunities entrepreneurial opportunity? A
(6 papers) review of its moderating role
Samuel and Joe 2016 5 Social media and entrepreneurship
Mack et al. 2017 20 Entrepreneurs’ use of Internet and
Social Media applications
Ahmad et al. 2018 31 Reflections of entrepreneurs of small
and medium-sized enterprises
concerning the adoption of social
media and its impact on
performance outcomes: evidence
from the UAE
Rippa and 2019 27 Digital academic entrepreneurship:
Secundo The potential of digital technologies
on academic entrepreneurship
Crammond et al. 2018 8 Managing knowledge through
social media: modeling an
entrepreneurial approach for Table 7.
Scottish SMEs and beyond Mapping of papers
according to the
(continued ) research areas
IJEBR Research areas Authors Year Citations Title
27,1
Social media as enablers of Wang et al. 2017 13 Analyzing entrepreneurial social
networking and networks with big data
entrepreneurial ecosystems (5 Drummond et al. 2018 16 The impact of social media on
papers) resource mobilisation in
entrepreneurial firms
164 Argyris and 2016 8 Knowledge entrepreneurship:
Ransbotham Institutionalising wiki-based
knowledge-management processes
in competitive and hierarchical
organisations
Estrin et al. 2018 29 The evolution and adoption of
equity crowdfunding: entrepreneur
and investor entry into a new
market
Sahaym et al. 2019 6 Crowdfunding success through
social media: going beyond
entrepreneurial orientation in the
context of small and medium-sized
Table 7. enterprises

media in entrepreneurship for supporting the creation of innovative enterprises and

individual inclusions and emancipation.
Research area 2: Social media as tools for entrepreneurial marketing. With a larger number
of papers shaping the period from 2012 to 2018, the papers included in this area range from a
strategic to the more applicative issues. Starting from Park et al. (2017), social media are
presented into a larger debate on Web 2.0 for evaluating their effectiveness in the creation of
stable relationships with users by businesses and educational institutes, their successful
positioning and the engagement of their stakeholders. In the same direction, Nambisan and
Zahra (2016) highlight the effectiveness of social media and specifically Twitters for the
development of a narrative actions supporting value co-creation, knowledge sharing and
interactions with potential customers. Moreover, social media are identified as tools with
positive implications in terms of brand awareness, customers’ relationships and market
shares (Ahmad et al., 2018), the growth of ecommerce also in developing countries (Shemi and
Procter, 2018) and powerful communication channels for enhancing credibility and
sustainability of SMEs (Duffy and Pruchniewska, 2017; Samuel and Joe, 2016).
Research area 3: Social media as sources of entrepreneurial opportunities. The papers
published in this area cover a recent timeframe starting from 2016. In this area, social media
are identified as sources for entrepreneurial opportunities, indispensable part of the
entrepreneurial practice and useful platforms for the growth of the business (Park et al., 2017).
The identification of entrepreneurial opportunities on social media can be realized through
the implementation of a multiple channels as argued in the study of Mack et al. (2017), who
focus the attention of new ventures and provide evidences related to the embracement of
social media to recognize business opportunities in replying to the technological change. The
dynamics of technological changes as impacting the strategic dimensions of
entrepreneurship are also presented as trends at the study of Rippa and Secundo (2019),
who demonstrate how social media, in addition to the other smart technologies and MOOCs
(Massive Open On line Courses) are tools for democratizing the access to entrepreneurial
experiences and identify new opportunities, especially in the academic entrepreneurship. Due
to the intensive use of social media, the collective involvement of the several categories of
academic stakeholders, starting from alumni, future students entrepreneurs, academic
entrepreneurs and staff, can be enhanced; the final results is the grow of spin-offs, startups, Social media for
science park, the commercialization of the university research to impact more on the social entrepreneurship
and economic growth.
Research area 4: Social media as enablers of networking and entrepreneurial ecosystems. As
for this area, four papers have been published in 2017 and 2018. Social media can be also
identified as tools for collecting financial resources from a distributed community of
stakeholders and enabling networking forms of interest for the development of new ventures,
as argued by Estrin et al. (2018), in their study on equity crowd funding. Also Wang et al. 165
(2017) refer to entrepreneurship as a networked activity, and in their study on Twitter data
collection they demonstrate as the usage of specific hashtags, such as #smallbiz and
#entrepreneur, can create more engagement in the community of entrepreneurs. Further
evidence on the contribution that social media can offer at the creation of a community of
stakeholders is offered by the study of Drummond et al. (2018), who empirically demonstrate
as Facebook and Twitter create a dyadic engagement, knowledge sharing and coordinated
operational processes.

Discussions, implications and future research agenda

This section aims to discuss the main findings and to provide implications of theory and
practices coming from the three research questions recalled below:
(1) RQ1. How is the entrepreneurship literature developing according to the prominent
adoption of social media?
(2) RQ2. What is the focus of the literature within social media for entrepreneurship?
(3) RQ3. What are the implications for the research in the field of social media for
entrepreneurship?
The implications are organized into the following sub-sections.
Implication 1. How is the entrepreneurship literature developing according to the
prominent adoption of social media?
Our SLR has highlighted that the debate on social media for entrepreneurship is relatively
young, by covering a period of more than 10 years, from 2009 to 2020. A first paper has been
published in 2009 by Jones and Iredale, but is only in 2014 that a more considerable interest
has been reserved to the topics by scholars and researchers, till to arrive at 20 papers in 2019
and a meaningful number of already published papers also in 2020. This demonstrates the
actuality of the research focus and the need of a deep exploration in future studies about the
role of social media for the different forms of entrepreneurship process. In terms of authors’
specialization, the community of scholars working in the field presents a wide large coverage
of interests in several scientific domains. Clearly, the main fields have been identified into the
areas of social science and business management, but the topics recalled the attention of a
cross disciplinary community of researchers, shaping the field of computer science,
engineering, arts and humanity and environmental science. In the same direction, the
analysis of the keywords has showed as with the exception of the two main topics
(entrepreneurship and social media); authors present differentiated interests of research
shaping from social capital, big data, student entrepreneurship and e-commerce. All this
highlights the multifaceted dimension of the phenomenon and suggests new roots for the
development of future studies toward integrated and cross disciplinary frameworks. In terms
of individual contributions and recognition of the most influencing authors, our analysis
allowed to identify three main works as most cited ones(considering the CPY) such as Rippa
and Secundo (2019), Ahmad et al. (2018) and Estrin et al. (2018) This evidence discloses the
opportunity for a deeper specialization and the need of a more focused and consolidated
IJEBR research in the field. About the journal specialization, the debate has resulted dispersed, and
27,1 the number of journals identified is relatively high if correlated with the number of papers
published (55 journals publish a number of papers ranging from one to four, even if only one,
Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development has published four papers). As well
recognized venues of publication and outstanding sources of inspiration for scholars and
researchers, the identification of these journals highlight the relevance of the topics at the
basis of our analysis and the promising intersection they present.
166 Implications 2. What is the focus of the literature within social media for
entrepreneurship?
The analysis of the thematic clusters in the field of social media for entrepreneurship has
allowed us to identify four main areas of specialization related to the social mediaas: (1)
technologies for entrepreneurial learning and self-employment; (2) tools for entrepreneurial
marketing; (3) sources of entrepreneurial opportunities and (4) enablers of networking and
entrepreneurial ecosystems. The integration of content analysis and studying of the full
papers has allowed us to understand the original contributions by characterizing the four
areas in their own specializations as well as their limitations.
We found that the debate on social media adoption for entrepreneurship has received,
starting from the 2009 when the first article appeared, a growing attention. Despite the two
areas of social media and entrepreneurship have received a great attention in both the
communities of social science and business scholars separately, their intersection discloses
several areas of deepening. It can be highlighted that still a fragmented and initial debate can
be observed focusing mainly on some entrepreneurship processes to move toward a more
diffused to share information and knowledge within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Indeed,
some conclusions can be drawn from the SLRs analysis: the use of social media by
entrepreneurs has been largely been with respect to the identification of entrepreneurial
opportunities at enterprise and academic level (see Mack et al., 2017; Park et al., 2017; Rippa
and Secundo, 2019). Moreover, studies agree that social media marketing had been vital to the
survival and growth of the entrepreneur’s business (see Ahmad et al., 2018; Nakara et al., 2012;
Nambisan and Zahra, 2009; Shemi and Procter, 2018). This literature touches on several
aspects of marketing such as customer relationship management, advertisement, visibility
and sales. However, beyond marketing, which seems like the primary usage; recent studies
(2016–2018) have started to document use for crowd funding, networking, information search
and ecosystem creation. This usage has been strategic to move ahead the entrepreneurial
activities with recent highlights being co-creation and innovations in ecosystems (Argyris
and Ransbotham, 2016; Drummond et al., 2018; Estrin et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2017). Finally, it
cannot be neglected that as entrepreneurship can be seen as a continuous learning process,
the social media find a relevant impact on the enhancement and facilitation of this process.
Incoherence with evidences related to the nature of the venues of publication and the
thematic specialization of the authors, this result highlights, as the two topics have been till
now observed mainly from a business management and Social science perspectives, by
disclosing the need of future and deeper investigations also in the fields of information science
and engineering, with contributions more focused on the technical features. Another
consideration arises in terms of operations and entrepreneurial processes. The content analysis
has also allowed to identify a consolidated focus on the marketing. This is clearly the result of
the adoption of social media and Web 2.0 technologies in the marketing more than in other
operational processes as well as due to the process of democratization and customers’
empowerment that these technologies have generated at which the marketing tries to provide
answer. Also in this case, the comprehension of the phenomenon is partial and limited to the
dynamic of dialogue, brand awareness and reputation. Considering the potential impact of
social media in all the dimensions of operations, areas for future investigations can be identified
into the investigation of emerging organizational models, open innovation, data driven value Social media for
co-creation, smart and dynamic decision support systems and business intelligence. entrepreneurship
A further interesting dimension emerging into the analysis is represented by the role of
social media as venues for entrepreneurial learning. This thematic area is promising for two
main reasons. First reason is related to the coherence with the emerging debate on
entrepreneurship as long-life learning processes resulting from networking, contextualized
experiences, continuous research and experimentation. Second reason is identifiable into the
process of emancipation that entrepreneurship is able to provide by allowing to overcome 167
limitations in terms of industrial patterns, education, social context and gender. All these
aspects represent areas for future investigation of promising and growing interest.
Implications 3. What are the implications for the research in the field of social media for
entrepreneurship?

Future research agenda

The analysis conducted in terms of thematic clustering, content analysis and citations’
impact allows us to derive some useful insights about the most relevant areas for a future
research agenda. This is especially true if we consider that the phenomenon is still in its
infancy. Besides understanding the nature and the state of the art, this study focalized the role
of social media for entrepreneurship with a scalable analysis at macro, meso and micro level.
The results of these SLRs have offered an illuminated exploration of the contributions of
social media as source of entrepreneurial opportunities, enablers of networking and
entrepreneurial ecosystems, tools for entrepreneurial marketing and venues for
entrepreneurial learning. This confirms the goodness of the intuition at the basis of the
study, despite the full comprehension of role of social media into the complex articulation of
an entrepreneurial process needs to be fully understood. Future research agenda is depicted
in Table 8 by taking in consideration the four thematic areas emerging into the content
analysis, with the aim to cover areas that are still unexplored or under researched and to
derive roots for the future agenda of research, practitioners and policy makers.

Conclusions and limitations

For concluding this SLR, it is useful to recall the initial motivation at the basis of the study,
based on the need to investigate how the prominent technologies of social media, initially
diffused to allow people to be more connected and to collaborate among them, now are
permeating also the entrepreneurship field. Based on the review some key conclusions can be
reached:
(1) First, there is consensus on the role of social media for the continuous learning
process as required at organizational and academic level, both for entrepreneurs and
for students’ entrepreneurs. Moreover, social media could provide a valid support for
self -employment for women’s of with reference to more traditional industries such as
agriculture especially in developing countries.
(2) Second, social media is primarily used by entrepreneurs as tools to market products
and services. However, it can be observed a shift toward co-creation in networking
environment and information sharing in entrepreneurship ecosystem, as evidenced
by papers published between 2017 and2019. This tendency is rapidly moving toward
the use of social media for value creation purpose.
(3) Third, the role of social media has been mainly used to identify entrepreneurial
opportunities with reference to digital business with recent studies investigating the
impact of social media use on the final outcome of entrepreneurship.
 27,1

168
IJEBR

Table 8.
Future research

for entrepreneurship”
areas of “social media
agenda in the research
Future research agenda: social media and entrepreneurship
Sub- research areas Description Research questions

Social media as technologies for Social media are identified as tools for developing (1) What value does entrepreneurial process derive from the
entrepreneurial learning and self entrepreneurial competencies at academic and impact of social media tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn and
-employment organisational level and for sustaining self-employment Twitter?
(2) Do entrepreneurs understand the full potentialities to support
the entrepreneurial process through the use of social media?
(3) How can social media technologies enhance information and
knowledge acquisition for entrepreneurial learning?
(4) How does the adoption of social media as Facebook, Twitter
and LinkedIn could improve competencies and attitude of
students’ entrepreneurs (especially in less innovative areas)?
(5) How do entrepreneurs use social media as platform for digital
entrepreneurship?
(6) Why social media could support the overcoming of gender
issues in entrepreneurship?
(7) How social media could support the self-employment of
women in digital entrepreneurship?
(8) How social media are being used within the enterprise
education? Which students’ performances could be supported
by social media?

(continued )
 Future research agenda: social media and entrepreneurship
Sub- research areas Description Research questions

Social media as tools for Social media are used for the development of narrative (1) Which social media tools better support the entrepreneurs in
entrepreneurial marketing actions supporting value co-creation, knowledge sharing the marketing opportunities?
and interactions with potential customers (2) How social media help entrepreneurs, especially in SMEs in
marketing new product and services?
(3) Who are the “crowds” that contribute to entrepreneurship
thanks to the adoption of social media?
(4) How social media tools could improve and strengthen brand
reputation of SMEs?
(5) How social media support entrepreneurs in anticipating
customer needs and increase customer fidelity?
(6) Does social media facilitates the co-creation process among
entrepreneurs and customer?
(7) What is the impact of social media technologies on the
marketing activities and model of companies?
(8) To what extent the social media technologies contribute on the
economic performance of marketing activities?

(continued )
169
entrepreneurship
Social media for

Table 8.
 27,1

170
IJEBR

Table 8.
Future research agenda: social media and entrepreneurship
Sub- research areas Description Research questions

Social media as sources of Social media are sources for identifying entrepreneurial (1) How do social media support knowledge sharing and
entrepreneurial opportunities opportunities, and are useful platforms for the growth of the opportunity recognition for digital entrepreneurship?
entrepreneurial practice and business (2) How can social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter,
Googleþ, etc.) enhance students’ involvement in academic
entrepreneurship?
(3) How does big data analysis coming from social media could
enhance the opportunities identification in digital industries?
(4) How do the generativity effects produced by social media
platforms stimulate the emergence of entrepreneurial
opportunities in students and nascent entrepreneurs?
(5) Why social media could enhance the identification of several
opportunities in traditional industries?
(6) Why social media could develop value for the entrepreneurial
process?
(7) Which are the entrepreneurship activities/processes more
influenced by the social media revolution?
(8) How does the adoption of social media can facilitate crowd
funding for the start-up phase?
Social media as enablers of Social media enable networking forthe development of new (1) How does the cooperation enabled by social media among
networking and entrepreneurial ventures, collecting financial resources from a distributed entrepreneurs shape entrepreneurial processes and outcomes?
ecosystems community of stakeholders and sustaining relationships (2) How social media impacts on the entrepreneurial ecosystem
among enterprises supporting student start-ups?
(3) How social media facilitate and enable the creation of
entrepreneurial ecosystem among different stakeholders?
Findings show that despite the number of papers published on social media and Social media for
entrepreneurship in the period 2009–2020 is starting to reach a consistent volume, the entrepreneurship
analysis of their role as key factors and sources for new entrepreneurial discovery process
and for communicating the product and services on the market is still dominated by unrelated
research. Trends observed in terms of authors’ productivity, impact of their research in terms
of citations, and their geographical areas has depicted a profile of community of scholars and
researchers dispersed, with limited collaboration and the presence of a limited number of
authors really focused on the topics with outstanding performances. Despite this, the positive 171
trends of growth registered during 2018 and 2020 are promising. In the same direction, the
analysis of publications’ venues has allowed to identify a coherent correspondence between
the thematic specialization of the journals and the scientific contributions published,
although the need of consolidating the relevance of the issues of social media and
entrepreneurship needs to be more analyzed with reference to the different level of analysis
(macro, meso and micro) and with a specific focus on the single processes. The exploration of
such issues, through theoretical and empirical contributions, aims to overcome the limitations
that still characterize the debate on social media and entrepreneurship, through holistic and
multidisciplinary bases, to consolidate and increase the scientific background of a
community of scholars and researchers specialized in such topics, and to identify
unexplored and promising roots for scientific and practical speculations. This evidence
calls for a holistic and integrated frameworks aimed to comprehend the relevance and
implications of the single social media tools such as blog, Facebook and Twitter on the
specific steps and processes characterizing the entrepreneurial process. In motivating our
research to embrace a SLR, we have focused our attention on articles published in several
journals, moving from journals in the social science and business area to include journal with
information system and engineering view.
Limitations of the study. Some limitations can be identified into the keywords as well as
into the database chosen for framing the initial papers’ selection. As authors, we are aware
that this could represent a limitation since we cannot assume that valuable researches related
to our topics could have been published on different venues not listed in our database. Indeed,
we decided to select the key word social media without replicating the search on the single
social media tools (Facebook, Twitter and Blogs). Second, the validity of the evidences
collected are limited to the timing frame considered. Third, as every beginning of a new
journey (Massaro et al., 2016), a SLR is relevant for the contribution of inspiration more than
for the state of the art it is able to provide. Fourth, the review of the literature could be not so
exhaustive, with the exclusion of conference papers and book chapters. Lastly, while care was
taken to select a relevant range of search terms rapid advancements in the domain of social
media may mean that some terms were overlooked. However, it is believed that the review
conducted, and integrative framework developed will provide a useful foundation for future
research in the domain. Accordingly, we hope this work contributes to identify lacks in the
debate on social media and entrepreneurship and to be of inspiration for the future works of
scholars and practitioners interested into the advancement of such promising future
research areas.

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177

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Giustina Secundo can be contacted at: [email protected]

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