Impact of social media in the growth and development of digital entrepreneurship in Nigeria

Abstract

Traditional entrepreneurship is regarded as the process of classifying and expending the prospects that are in the market, transforming the concepts into achievement, performing marketing undertakings to promote an innovativeness, harmonizing ideas and bearing risk and uncertainties that are involved in the business in order to strive for excellence. But, with advent and development of information and communication technology (ICT), the processes and functions performed gradually changed to what we now have as digital entrepreneurship that entrepreneurs use and are getting momentum with the use of social media. Digital entrepreneur is considered independent by accumulating of functionality through digital means, relying on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) as well as digital media facilities to discover prospective clients. These facilities accord digital entrepreneur the chance to support their professional ethics outside the confined community using different social media platforms. Digital entrepreneurship encompasses online businesses that individuals create and run which combines business, market knowledge and network technology to reinvent traditional business practices through digitization, creation of a new venture, Transformation of Existing Business, Creating and use of Novel Digital Technologies. This is qualitative research which aims to examine the influence of social media in digital entrepreneurship. It was established in the research that most entrepreneurship fails due to lack of implementing innovative and novel technologies like the social media. The paper found out that those entrepreneurships that embrace the digital technologies succeeds and recommended the usage of social media for the development as well as growth of digital entrepreneurship in Nigeria.