Social Media Marketing Strategy for Social Business: A Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Social entrepreneurship is gaining recognition as a practical way to address societal challenges through innovative business practices. Social business, pioneered by Nobel Peace Laureate Muhammad Yunus, peruses economic sustainability while generating measurable social impact by reinvesting profits into their mission rather than distributing them to shareholders. In Malaysia, social enterprises hold considerable potential for transformation but continue to struggle with limited market visibility, weak branding, and ineffective digital engagement. It is due to the prior research on social media strategy has concentrated on profit-driven small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and has treated “social media strategy” as a single, undifferentiated construct rather than disaggregating it into the specific resource-based elements that drive financial outcomes. To address this gap, the present paper proposes an integrative conceptual framework, explicitly grounded in the Resource-Based View (RBV) theory, that identifies platform strategy, content strategy, brand awareness, and audience engagement as four intangible, VRIN-qualifying digital resources that jointly influence the sales growth of social enterprises. The framework is developed through a narrative RBV-guided synthesis of the social media marketing and social entrepreneurship literature, and four research propositions are advanced to guide future empirical testing. The paper contributes theoretically by extending RBV beyond its conventional emphasis on tangible resources into the digital and relational capabilities of hybrid, mission-driven organisations, and practically by providing social entrepreneurs and policymakers with actionable guidance for strengthening digital effectiveness. This paper uses “social enterprise” for consistency, in line with the terminology used by Malaysia, the Ministry of Entrepreneur Development and Cooperatives (MEDAC) and the majority of the Malaysian social-enterprise literature cited herein.