Limitations and future research
In order to investigate social media usage and its impact, only certain factors were included in the study. In a broader context, there may be other antecedents and impact factors. Therefore, the inclusion of only certain factors in the study may be considered a limitation. Nonetheless, the EFA results indicated that the factors included in the study explain 74% of the variance. The concentration on only a few social media tools can also be considered a limitation, but the results of the Web content analysis showed that only tools such as Facebook and Twitter were commonly used by Malaysian organizations. Since few empirical studies have examined the impact of social media usage on organizational performance, there are many paths for extending this research and more directions for future research to be considered. This study investigated the usage of social media considering social media tools in general. Since each social media tool has unique features and provides different benefits, future studies could concentrate on one social media tool in particular and investigate it in detail, which might provide a more complete understanding of the impact of that particular tool on organizations. Future studies should be conducted to compare the results between different countries for validation purposes. Similarly, there may be other social media impact factors that are important for other geographical contexts. Future studies should include those factors and investigate it in different country settings.
