Social Media Marketing Strategies Used by Small Retail Businesses

Role of the Researcher
When conducting a study, the responsibility lies with the researcher to collect, 
organize, and analyze emerging data throughout the research process (Collins & Cooper, 

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2014). Data might emerge from participant interviews or surveys and current literature 
on the topic. In qualitative research, the researcher becomes part of the research process 
(Draper, 2016). My duty as a researcher was to select a business problem that warranted 
further investigation, choose the appropriate method and design, remain objective and 
unbiased, identify prospective participants, and analyze and interpret the collected data.
Researchers must follow ethical guidelines throughout the entire research process. The 
Belmont Report (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1979), defined ethical 
standards and guidelines for the protection of humans, which I adhered to while 
conducting my study. Two critical components of ethical research, do no harm and 
provide full disclosure to participants, are necessary for ensuring ethical practices within 
research (Bromley, Mikesell, Jones, & Khodyakov, 2015).
As a professional in the Information Technology field, I was interested in learning 
more about the multiple benefits of social media and wanted to explore how small 
business leaders leveraged Internet technologies to increase their competitiveness. There 
are many benefits of social media technologies and I wanted to learn what strategies 
successful small business retailers used to engage customers. There is a need for more 
research on how to leverage social media so business leaders can fully understand and 
implement successful SMM strategies (Charlesworth, 2014). Other than my own 
personal interest and desire to add to existing literature on small business SMM 
strategies, I had no direct relationship with the topic of the study or with any of the 
interviewees. 

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Bias occurred at any stage of research and was hard to mitigate (Smith & Noble, 
2014); however, by understanding research bias, I can develop mitigation strategies. 
Smith and Noble (2014) discovered that research bias negatively affected the reliability, 
validity, and outcome of a study. Poggenpoel and Myburgh (2003) posited that the 
researcher’s discomfort with the topic, the researcher’s unpreparedness during the 
research process, and the researcher conducting inappropriate interviews could cause 
research bias and negatively affected the outcome of a study. Chenail (2011) and 
Poggenpoel and Myburgh (2003) that to address bias, the researcher must remain 
prepared throughout every phase of the research process, ask open-ended interview 
questions, stay humble to the research, anticipate any issues that may arise during the 
interviews, and address personal feelings while questioning the participants. Member 
checking is a technique used to reduce researcher bias and allowed participants to 
approve or clarify any interpretations made by the researcher (Harvey, 2015). Another 
technique used in qualitative studies to reduce bias and increase research validity is 
bracketing, which helped phenomenological researchers become more aware of their 
assumptions and intentionality (Sohn, Thomas, Greenberg, & Pollio, 2017).