Two-sided Markets and Network Effects:Social Media Networks and the Opportunity for SMEs

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1.0, University of Applied Sciences Saarbrücken, language: English, abstract: This topic is gaining more and more relevance nowadays. Platforms are taking the business world by storm - especially Social Networks like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter offer a revolutionary kind of communication for several online customer groups, especially for businesses. The Internet Growth pushed the globalization to a great extent which leads to markets being more transparent and competitive. The customer behavior has changed to a more active position - they want to be connected to businesses with the effect of reaching a new dimension in Customer Relationship Management. Large enterprises are doing well in social networking by staying in an ongoing communication with their customers - SMEs still struggle with this approach. Questions arise if utilization potential of social networks exists for middle-class businesses and how effectiveness and efficiency of SMEs, however, have improvement opportunities through the usage of social media channels. In terms of structure, this thesis is separated into two parts. Firstly, two-sided markets and networks effects are explained in general by analyzing focal aspects and major hurdles for platform founders. Afterwards, the focus will shift from platform pioneers to platform users regarding social networks where these platforms are analyzed to a great extent in combination with usage terms for SMEs.