Capacity

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4.1.2 Capacity

Nah and Saxton (2013) defined capacity as the organization’s size, time, money, website capability and presence. Therefore with this in mind, I investigated the organizations internal resources and website reach to see if capacity had a correlation to why PPSA and PPSE have decided to use social media. Also, though they have made the decision to adopt social media, I wanted to see if they find social media worth investing resources towards and how their decisions about investing in social media have varied while using it.

The first variable, organizational size, did not seem to have any relevance in the decision to adopt social media. From my observations and interviews I was able to deduct that social media was adopted because its what most organizations in Cambodia were doing at the time.

Neither PPSA or PPSE are large organizations, but since both are tourist attractions it was important for them to have a social media presence. Ultimately, organizational size was irrelevant to adoption. Instead it was more about visibility and reach.

PPSA began using Facebook in 2011 and this was attributed to Facebook’s growing popularity. They also joined Twitter in 2011 in order to further their reach. Instagram was added in 2016 and P5 explained it was because, “We had a Facebook and Twitter, but we did not have an Instagram, which I saw as a huge missed opportunity, because we are such a visual

organization (February 10, 2018).” PPSE initiated all of their social media platforms as soon as the social enterprise was launched in February 2013. I asked why they decided to incorporate Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and P1 informed me it was primarily due to reach.

I: So when you started using social media back in the day, why did you decide to use three social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter?

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P1: Reach. Just because they are different audiences. I even insist on Google plus, although I am the only person in the company who cares about Google plus. But I think whether or not it has a big audience, I think google, the platform, considers it when looking at your business as a whole. So now you have your google for business page, and it looks at everything, your maps, your google plus, activities. (P1 February 5, 2018)

From P1’s statement, it is apparent that social media was adopted to increase visibility and reach, therefore PPSE adopted more than just Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, but also decided to use YouTube, LinkedIn, and GooglePlus.

The next facet of capacity I explored were the internal resources of time and money. For time I observed that social media posting is actually quite time consuming, so both PPSA and PPSE have one person on staff whose primary job is to organize social media postings. In February 2018, they were actually in the process of training and hiring an assistant for the communications manager to handle social media, because it is so time consuming. This person attends various events to get live feeds, photos, and short video clips so they can post activities in a timely fashion. Therefore, because PPSA and PPSA were able to allocate time to social media, they were in turn able to adopt it as a social media strategy.

When it comes to finances, PPSA and PPSE had different strategies about allocating funds for boosting posts. In the beginning PPSA did not invest money towards social media, so the organization’s budget did not really affect their choice to use social media platforms.

However, social media is a transient platform that continuously changes and updates their algorithms which affects page likes and reach. Therefore, though money may have not played a role in the initial adoption, it did have an effect on the continuation of use. I was able to observe some major changes between my time at PPSA in 2017 and my returning in 2018. When I was working there in 2017, they were not boosting posts, but now, according to P4, they are boosting around 1-2 posts per month.

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I set up a budget, but I can’t remember what the number is exactly. I think I wanted to boost about 20 posts a year, so one or two per month. It is expensive, but as the Facebook algorithm changed, so if you don’t pay, people don’t see your posts, except if they go to news feed especially for organizations, so now we have to boost the posts (P4 February 13, 2018)

Furthermore, changes in the operations of Facebook created a need to make ads for promoting the page. This major change had to do with the addition of the ‘explore feed.’ In the fall of 2017 Facebook decided to conduct an experiment for six small countries, including Cambodia where an ‘explore feed’ was added to the platform in order to separate personal content from institutions and news publishers. Basically, the regular news feed most users are familiar with could only contain posts made by friends. On the other hand, posts coming from organizations, business, or news had their own feed, which required the action of clicking to open this separate feed. Facebook claimed that the goal of this experiment was to analyze

“ if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content (Harry, 2017).” This explore feed had major implications for the visibility of both PPSA and PPSE’S content. PPSA and PPSE interestingly had different opinions on this new change.

In a follow up email interview, P4, from PPSA expressed her thoughts about the explore feed:

It impacted a lot of our visibility on Facebook. If people don't look for our posts, they cannot see them anymore. Consequently, Facebook is not as powerful as before to communicate with a large audience. Now, when we want a post to be seen by a large audience, we need to pay to boost it (March 19, 2018)

Because of the explore feed, PPSA changed its strategy to begin allocating funds towards social media. Therefore money as an internal resource has played a role in the decision to continue using social media.

PPSE was slightly different because they had been paying to boost posts from the start of social media adoption. P1 and P2 explained that the process of running ads was mostly trial and error to see what worked for them. Ultimately, they determined that running ads was not really

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beneficial because the return of investment was low. Ads helped generate website traffic and fan page likes, but it did not always generate circus ticket sales. Furthermore, with changes in

algorithms and the addition of the explore feed, Facebook was becoming less useful in helping to generate ticket sales. P1 explained:

The ads resulted in a huge amount of referral traffic, but almost no conversion, so we stopped running the ads . . . Facebook organic reach stopped being useful about two years ago. I remember when I first started you could count on about 10-20% of followers seeing your post, and now its 2%. (February 5, 2018).

In terms of the explore feed, P1 found that the explore feed had little effect on visibility.

It was very useful, actually. I liked being able to look at "fluff" when I wanted to, or

"news" when I wanted to. Now it's impossible to browse "news". It was just rolled-out wrong. They (Facebook) needed to explain the benefit to users to be able to browse the kind of content they wanted, when they wanted. Facebook never did that, that I'm aware of. They just suddenly flipped a switch. . . For all the hyperventilating about it, it really didn't matter in terms of how often Page posts appeared in a user's timeline. Changes in Facebook algorithms over time whittled down generic reach to about 2-3% of followers anyway. Maybe a little more for the kind of content Facebook wants to push, like video, especially Facebook Live. The only way for a Page to get any kind of reach is to pay for it.

Though boosting social media pages resulted in more traffic, the return of investment was too low, therefore funds had little affect on the continuation of use of social media platforms.

The final facet of capacity deals with website age and reach. PPSE’s website was created in 2013 at the same time as the social media, so in this case the website had no effect on

adoption, as PPSE was a brand new enterprise. For PPSA I was not able to find an answer on the exact date they started having a website, however I do know that their current WordPress site was built in 2016. Social media had already been established at this point, but the website was rebuilt to incorporate blogs which in turn were promoted mostly on Facebook and Twitter. So in this sense, the website was actually built to match the social media strategy instead of the

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website influencing the adoption of social media.

Furthermore it is important to note that analytics were not being used by PPSA in the beginning, indicating that they were not measuring website traffic at the time of adoption. It was not until recently, that PPSA discovered the value of doing data analytics. When asking P5 about this, she explained that in retrospect, PPSA should have been paying attention more to the

numbers, however, because of a lack of training in social media management, everything was experimental. Instead, they measured their success in the number of followers, likes, and comments, which at the time was increasing. Also P5 mentioned that once they started paying attention to the data (sometime in 2017), the website reach was about 100-150 hits per day, and on days/weeks when they shared blog posts they saw huge spikes in the click rate. Nevertheless, the social media managers at PPSA were still unaware of the exact amounts of donations or ticket sales that were attributed from social media.