Abstract

Social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, have not only become a popular communication tool among individuals but also provided companies with an additional channel for marketing communications. While social media marketing is becoming widely spread, there are still companies that struggle to implement it within their marketing strategies. An especially vulnerable group of companies is family firms due to their unique characteristics, such as involvement of family members in ownership and management, a conflict between family-oriented and business-oriented goals, and concerns for succession. Using secondary data and social media metrics of 151 family firms in North America, we investigated the effect of family involvement on marketing management. We first showed that family owners decrease the amount of unexpected marketing spending and lower the likelihood of Facebook adoption for marketing communications. We then found that involvement of family members on the board of directors promoted an earlier adoption of Facebook and enhanced a more effective usage of the Facebook account by attracting more followers. These results suggest that family owners and family directors do not participate in the decision-making process and implementation of selected strategies to the same extent: while family involvement in ownership hinders innovative approaches to marketing, family involvement in management enables the firm to use the unique resources and capabilities provided by family directors to achieve the firm objectives.