Chapter 4 Small Business Owners and Social Media Behavior: How Entrepreneurs Use and are Used by New Digital Platforms

Textbook knowledge about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship is always very sterile because discussion treats enterprises and their actors in an “all are alike” approach as if there is a unique and average size and type. Entrepreneurship takes place in multiple sites and spaces and researchers must specify and contextualize rather than decontextualizing their cases. The chapter argues that the vast majority of entrepreneurs falls into the category of micro-entrepreneurs where economic activities are run without further employees paid by wage or salary. In the average of the European Union, more than 70 out of 100 entrepreneurs belong to this group of small business(wo)men. However, even this category is wide and covers many forms of activities under different labels, such as small farmers, freelancers, solo self-employed, independent professionals and others. In this context, also the development of new media and technologies as well as digitalization influence those economic activities of the actors due to their significant impact on processes and possibilities. Social media influences those one-(wo)men-firm owners privately and commercially but social media are – vice versa – also an object of influence since businesspeople use platforms to orchestrate themselves on the internet. Online platforms serve as tools to advertise where people create their own identity and typical brand. This chapter asks for the links between craftsmen, artisans and micro-entrepreneurs and their use and handling of social media by presenting first empirical results of an investigation which has been undertaken in Austria.