How Beneficial is Social Media for Business Process Management? A Systematic Literature Review

Even though the implementation of different technological tools is already a trend, there are still aspects that should be refined so that companies' business processes can be improved. This is where social media comes to the foreground. Consequently, the objective of this paper is to study the evolution of research on social media implementation in the field of business process management. A systematic literature review was carried out following a search for and selection of articles that met our objective. To classify the sampled papers, we followed validated frameworks regarding social media management and business process management. Additionally, a detailed look at the sampled case studies was done to highlight companies' experiences in the field. Our final sample comprised 47 papers that simultaneously encompassed social media and business process management. The papers were classified according to their publishing frequency, the article type, both the topics and sectors to which they belonged, their methodological approaches, and the importance for business process management capability areas as well as capability subareas. Finally, word frequency queries were used to better understand diverse social media applications in business processes and to derive practical recommendations. The necessity for a multidisciplinary approach toward business processes was detected; therefore, topics, such as psychology, business economics, or information systems, were included, emphasizing innovation strategies, including gamification, big data, or crowdsourcing. Our most important recommendation concerns the evolution of business process management through different social media tools as a means to achieve a transition toward the recommended omnichannel management approach.